With protests and public opinion on climate change rising to impactful levels, organizational goals and approaches need to be well defined. The tools may already be in place to achieve environmental excellence. But the most common mistake is organizations who have quality skills and tools fail to apply them to reducing their organization’s environmental impacts.
It is not uncommon for process teams to be fully engaged in total quality management (TQM). But TQM programs such as lean Six Sigma is a foreign language to their Facilities or Environmental Health & Safety (EHS) managers who are struggling to identify and remove waste from their organizations by way of traditional environmental approaches This cultural divide needs to come together.
In recent years, sustainable development strategy for all organizations has become an important issue around the globe. (Evidence for climate change abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depth of the oceans.) It has required the organization to review their current systems to improve the overall triple bottom-line performance (i.e. economic, environmental, and social). Rising to these challenges requires transforming management systems and incorporating sustainable management systems throughout the organization. Synergies between TQM and sustainable development have been discussed but further important synergies between quality management and environmental management have not been fully explored. Process focus and process management are believed to be important for realizing these synergies. Assuming total quality management impacts on organizations will continue, what types of TQM improvement initiatives will develop in the future to meet the anticipated organizational changes?
Today’s sustainable development frameworks encourage businesses to ask better questions about impacts on stakeholders, society, and the environment, and they seek to develop the tools and measures needed to demonstrate improvements. The sustainability of the organization relies on its ability to monitor the external environment for opportunities, trends and risks, and also its ability to learn, change and innovate in response to the results of monitoring. To achieve environmental sustainability, the organization should focus on its results as well as on its process.
An impactful industrial revolution
The quality revolution that took place in manufacturing companies in the late ‘70s offers a number of parallels that can help city government and corporate decision-makers understand and address sustainability challenges. At the onset quality initiatives were initially viewed by most companies as nothing more than an added cost — something to be tacked onto the end of existing manufacturing systems to prevent “low-quality” products from reaching customers.
The birth of total quality management in the United States was in direct response to a quality revolution in Japan following World War II. Japan had a widely held reputation for shoddy, poor quality exports, and their goods were shunned by international markets. This led Japanese organizations to explore new ways of thinking about quality. The Japanese welcomed input from foreign companies and lecturers, including two American quality experts that changed the world’s leaders thinking about TQM.
Over a half-century ago, quality pioneers W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran encouraged organizations to ask better questions about corporate challenges and enabled companies to redesign systems for improvement. They started with a systems approach and then grounded quality in practical analytical tools to foster product, service, and organizational improvements.
W. Edwards Deming had become frustrated with American managers when most programs for statistical quality control were terminated once the war and government contracts came to an end. He took his talents to Japan which welcomed him and his statistical process knowledge with open arms.
Joseph M. Juran predicted the quality of Japanese goods would overtake the quality of goods produced in the United States by the mid-1970s because of Japan’s revolutionary rate of quality improvement. Japan’s strategies represented the new “total quality” approach rather than relying purely on inspection.
There are a number of forward looking organizations that view quality as a competitive advantage. Take the case of Toyota, they viewed quality as an opportunity rather than a cost, and their investment in total quality management paid off handsomely. Rather than simply posting inspectors at the end of the assembly line, Toyota integrated quality considerations earlier in their assembly lines and into processes that preceded manufacturing, such as product design and research and development (R&D). Next, Toyota pushed quality considerations even further upstream by working with suppliers to develop quality standards for the materials flowing into the assembly lines.
Eventually Toyota expanded quality management beyond products into behaviors. The companies asked how their people could collaborate more effectively to ensure higher quality processes. This deeper, more integrated approach to TQM paid off in the form of competitive advantage, as the success of Toyota in the 1990s and beyond demonstrates. The quality effort took Toyota from the back of the pack to the industry leader in automobile quality, reliability and sales. They set the standard for others to meet. Toyota has set its management machines on total waste. It is integrating the quality and the environmental cultures to gain a true understanding of total waste and in the future they may set the standard in the auto industry on sustainability management as well.
Sustainability has not exited its infancy, but there are strong signs that select companies are positioning themselves to benefit from sustainability opportunities. Wal-Mart, GE, FedEx, Toyota, Hilton, Budweiser are managing environmental risks just as others used the quality revolution to succeed in their markets.
Rather than treating sustainability as a risk and cost to be managed, sustainability leaders are starting to integrate sustainability into their processes and cultures. In some cases, collaborating with a broad range of partners including governmental and non-governmental organization initiatives. A prime example of this collaboration is the Energy Star program which was developed by industry and EPA.
The wide range of powerful external forces such as competition, government, and consumer are driving sustainability and may soon nudge its evolution into a full-blown revolution. As the development of sustainability programs continues, companies with the structure and talent necessary to integrate sustainability capabilities deeper into their organizations and cultures will have a competitive advantage. As we struggle with approaches to reduce the impact on our climate the answers may be in the quality tools that all sectors understand.
Quality Tools for sustainability management- Lean Six Sigma
Lean, Six Sigma and Green approaches can make a positive contribution to the economic, quality, social and sustainability performance of organizations. However organizations have found integration and implementation challenging.
Lean management and Six Sigma are two concepts which share similar methodologies and tools. Both programs are Japanese-influenced, but they are two different programs. Lean management is focused on eliminating waste using a set of proven standardized tools and methodologies that target organizational efficiencies, while Six Sigma's focus is on eliminating defects and reducing variation. Both systems are driven by data though Six Sigma is much more dependent on accurate data.
The Six Sigma methodology, as it has evolved over the last two decades, provides a proven framework for problem solving and organizational leadership and enables leaders and practitioners to employ new ways of understanding and solving their sustainability problems.
Six Sigma takes internal and external stakeholder needs into account. Setting up projects that have clearly defined goals can support sustainable business practices in many ways, from tracking the performance of an adjustment, to improving supply chain processes, to monitoring the quality of a product using more “green” materials. Well-planned projects create the data needed to compel leaders to extend triple bottom line considerations and to continually monitor those practices currently in place.
As the foundation for most Six Sigma professionals, DMAIC is a bullet proof method for process improvement. Standing for ‘Define’, ‘Measure’, ‘Analyze’, ‘Improve’, and ‘Control’, these five steps prove time and time again to find errors within a system and offer beneficial solutions. Organizations are in the process of developing a DMAIC methodology to address their sustainability / Climate Change programs.
Root cause analysis: this Six Sigma tool is a great resource for climate change for scientists because it forces you to find the exact cause for your issues. Whether you want to stop rising sea levels or decrease smog in large cities, root cause analysis finds the exact moment errors occur. Likewise, a successful root cause analysis will provide you with solid ground work for implementing changes to your organizations, systems, and societies. Without knowing the exact cause of an issue, you will never successfully resolve it.
Synergistically, Lean aims to achieve continuous flow by tightening the linkages between process steps while Six Sigma focuses on reducing process variation (in all its forms) for the process steps thereby enabling a tightening of those linkages. In short, Lean exposes sources of process variation and Six Sigma aims to reduce that variation enabling a virtuous cycle of iterative improvements towards the goal of continuous flow.
The three pillars of Lean — increasing value, reducing waste and respecting people — fit neatly into a sustainable perspective. Lean has already developed the analytical tools we now need to fit them to lock in on sustainability solutions. Rather than search for new solutions, Lean tools may be the answer.
Lean offers a clear advantage by engaging people in the process of problem solving, it reduces resistance to the recommended solutions. Rather, participants see their ideas implemented and be successful because they are their ideas. Lean is inclusive it is done by people who feel empowered to create environmental solutions. The other big advantages of lean / quality programs is that management has benefited from the programs. It assumes that the people actually closest to the work, whether they are working on an assembly line or cleaning up a hazardous waste site, or developing new policies are best suited to identify problems and devise robust solutions.
Over the years TQM has evolved to become more and more encompassing through the integration of various processes and activities. Sustainability does, however, mean that TQM should not be left as an “act of fate” but needs to be managed through taking a strategic perspective, emphasis on measurement and taking action and a continual focus not only on the end customer to meet requirements but also on all those which by their products or processes interact. Looking at how TQM could contribute to sustainability by reinforcing the economic dimension. This could be seen as making sustainability more business focused. The opposite would be to see how sustainability could contribute to TQM by broadening the focus to all the dimensions of the total business and enlarge the focus from the supply chain to customers to stakeholders.
The question is can we build a cross-organizational collaboration to build a new approach to sustainability in government, industry and the private sector. An important issue is can organizations build the bridges to bring the culture of quality management and environmental management together? Both organizations have a lots to offer in the battlefield of efficiency. I believe today there’s definitely a misconnection there, but there are opportunities through collaboration and education. Both organizations have the same vision and goals in becoming efficient in all areas and cut waste. I strongly believe in the use of technologies, design, processes and cultural change, as the key for solving global issues, and climate change.
