Continuous Improvement Requires a Quality Culture

Continuous improvement culture helps organizations to develop committed employees, delighted customers and build value added products and services. Building a continuous improvement requires a quality culture. Dynamic organizations are the ones, who are always seeking new ways of doing the business by continuously improving their business operations and activity to create a growth in the market share and increase the profitability. Continuous improvement activity is emphasized in the ISO 9000:2000 Quality Management Systems Standard. Continuous improvement activities are important not only for the survival but for the growth as well as for the innovative products, services and solutions. Many companies and organizations strive to be quality conscience, culture sensitive and socially responsible. Culture is defined as ‘the way we do things around here’. The way employees actually behave, think and believe determines the culture. Culture is the personality of the organization. Culture is what employees do when no one is watching. It is a ‘walk the talk’. Quality culture refers to the degree of awareness, commitment, collective attitude, and behavior of the organization with respect to quality. The key ingredients of the continuous improvement process are teams, technology to define product, process and information, deployment of best practice, and leadership doing the catalytic work. Continuous improvement encompasses all forms of improvement in the form of elimination of defects, improvements incrementally adding value, larger scale, long tem innovations, strategic in nature dramatically redefining systems, processes and outputs. Steps required for the continuous improvement are measure, monitor, manage and maximize.The philosophy of continuous improvement lies in root cause analysis and resulting actions.Continual improvement is a process of increasing the effectiveness of an organization to fulfill quality policy and quality objectives. Improvement activities fail due to number of reasons. Organizations may have extensive quality control measures in place, but, not everyone lives and breathes them. Under the competitive pressures, companies cannot afford to have anything but the very best quality. An action riented quality culture, attitude and willingness must be developed within the organization not only to survive, but, to thrive.

Keywords:

Total Quality Management , Customer Satisfaction , Customer Loyalty , Team Spirit , Process Improvements , Motivation , Leadership