In the current issue of the local restaurant and cooking magazine, the featured article is about the important relationships some of our city’s best chefs have with local farmers and growers.  In the half-dozen relationships profiled, rarely does the topic touch on price (and when price is mentioned, it focuses on the great value).  The emphasis is on other features:  freshness, taste, quality, variety, shared attitudes.

These chefs also know their customers.  The chefs understand that people come to their restaurant because they want a great dining experience, not because they want to save a dollar or two on a meal.  The chefs know the importance of having great local suppliers in order to deliver that great dining experience.

Any business that uses suppliers can take a lesson from this.  Too often business focus heavily on unit price from their suppliers, and they forget to focus on total cost, relationships, and even more importantly, how choosing suppliers impacts their customers.

Are you really saving money if you select a supplier based on unit cost, but shipments are late, parts are defective, or they require constant hand-holding to understand specifications or other criteria?  The union shop across town may not be able to compete with a third-world supplier on a unit price basis, but it you account for the total cost (i.e. of testing and dealing with defective materials, extra inventory or production delays because shipments are traveling  halfway around the world, the personal relationship and convenience of dealing with a local supplier), you may be saving money in the long run if the local supplier consistently delivers quality parts on time with little or no oversight.

Plus, if supplier problems causes you to lose a customer, how much have you really saved?

For those who work with processes, we know that variability is the key factor.  The desired state is more consistency and less variability.  When processes have wide variability and inconsistent results, we call the process out of control.  When processes operate within established limits, the process is considered in control.

Typically, we attribute process variability to two causes—common cause and special cause.  Common cause variation is expected.  It is a result of the process design, machinery, and activities.  For example, I walk to the train station every day after work, and it takes six to 10 minutes.  The variation is due to factors like how long I have to wait for the elevator, how many times the elevator stops, and how long I have to wait at crosswalk lights.  These variations occur every day, and they are expected.  They are common cause variations.

Then one day it took 12 minutes to walk to the train station.  It took longer because someone approached me on the sidewalk and asked for directions.  They were lost, so I took a few minutes to explain to them where they are and how to get to where they are going, plus exchange a few pleasantries.  But that doesn’t happen very often.  In fact, it hardly ever happens.  The next day I return to the six to 10 minute window for my walk to the station.  It was a special cause of variation.

When addressing variation in a process, you have to understand if the variation is due to common cause or special cause.  The type of variation determines the activities we need to take to reduce variation.

To reduce common cause variation, it usually takes experimentation and/or statistical analysis to optimize the process.  Experimentation means changing something and measuring the results over time.  Statistical analysis means looking at results in different ways—stratifying and categorizing data in diverse manners and employing varying statistical methods like Pareto charts.

For example, I might experiment and collect data and find that if I leave at 4:45 instead of 5:00, the elevators are much less busy, and variation in the time to reach the station is reduced.

Special cause variation is typically discovered using root cause analysis.  In my example it was easy to identify why it took extra time to reach the station, but frequently the cause of unexpected variation is not so easy to see.  It takes an investigation using quality tools like 5 whys or fishbone charts to understand what happened.  Then, you can take action to prevent the unexpected cause of variation or simply ignore it because you realize that it happens rarely and the consequences are acceptable (as in my example).  I don’t mind missing a train to help someone out.

Like anything else worth having, a continuity plan isn’t easy.  However, the most elegant, complex plan isn’t necessarily the best one.  Start simple, with a framework like the one below, and build on that.

1) Do you have a plan in place?

• If not … DON’T PANIC!  Action driven by panic can often be worse than no action.
• If so, when was it last tested? How thoroughly?

2) Have you conducted risk assessments?  What is the risk of a swine flu outbreak crippling your business (vs. other events, like a flood, tornado, or gas leak)?

3) Have you identified and prioritized your vital operations?  (Don’t leave out payroll and benefits, whatever you do!)

4) What’s your employee attendance policy?  “Come in unless you’re on your deathbed?”

• Do you have a telecommuting policy?
• How robust are your security policy and practices?
• How are your network and server capabilities (especially those you’ve outsourced)?

5) What is your chain of communication?

• How sure are you that your employees are getting the same information at the same time?  How about your contractors/outsourcers?  Are you keeping them informed?
• Are you able to keep your customers, suppliers, etc., in the loop?

6) Are your suppliers adequately covered? (That is, do they have a continuity plan?) Should you be worried about an interruption of supplies or services? Do you have a fall-back position?

7) Is your staff sufficiently cross-trained that you’ll be able to withstand a loss of 10, 25, or even 50 percent of your staff for weeks at a time?

8 ) What is the line of succession?  Who makes executive decisions if the chief executive is incapacitated for a period of time?

9) When the flu bug has passed, be thankful you weren’t hit much worse.  Then get started on a real continuity plan.

Periodically test every piece of the plan. A desktop or bench test is better than no test at all, but a “live” test of every function, department, and facility in your continuity plan is a must!  If it’s been three or more years since any part of your plan was tested under simulated “real-world” conditions, you need to put your continuity plan to the test now!

I love teaching business training classes.  I tend to get engaged, intelligent participants who are eager to learn, willing to share, and with a desire to improve their organization.  Frequently, I get as much out of the experience as they do.

In a recent Well-Defined Processes class I had a particularly great group.  As usual, I came up with a very simple process example to illustrate concepts about processes.  In this case, I talked about baking a cake.

One participant really latched onto this concept, particularly in terms of writing procedures to document processes. “I am going to ask for cake recipes,” he said (in terms of developing procedures for his organization).  It is a great point.  Look at the back of cake mix box and see how effectively and efficiently it guides you through the process.

There is no unnecessary detail or descriptions of how to do things that you don’t need to be told how to do (like getting a mixer or turning it on).  There is no needless long-winded description of the chemical reactions that take place between the ingredients while mixing, and no explanation of the physical transformation that takes place while the cake is baking.  It has just a few simple steps with effective use of graphics that helps you properly execute the process.

Do you have too much information in your procedures?  To make your procedures usable, focus on the things people need to be told in order to execute the process, and leave out pointless directions and unnecessary explanations.

This swine flu is sure getting around quickly, isn’t it?  It’s front-page news in every daily paper you see and the lead story on every newscast.  It’s more than a little unsettling watching the numbers rise so quickly—all those pictures and videos of masked people.  Swine flu could push back the hoped-for economic recovery even further if it gets as bad as some people are predicting.

Swine Flu photo by sarihuella on flickr.com

It would be a terrific blow to your business if the swine flu outbreak turned into a pandemic and you lost 10 percent of your workforce—or more—to prolonged illness.  A simple but effective continuity plan—though it wouldn’t keep the problem away from your door—could help you weather this storm in fair shape.

But do you have such a plan?  Sad to say, you’re in the majority if you don’t, which leads to my next question.  Why do most of us wait until illness or other tragedies are on us before we ask ourselves, “What will I do?”  If you’re a small business owner, employing six trained, highly skilled workers, what if just one of them is out for a week or so with the flu?  Counting you, that’s 14 percent of your workforce!  If another one goes on the sick list at the same time, that’s 28% percent. Or what if it’s you, Ms. President?  What do you do?  Is NOW the time to put together a continuity plan?

Even after the swine flu passes, how many companies will say, “That was scary!  We’re putting a plan in place so we’re never caught unprepared?” How many of those companies will actually develop and implement a continuity plan?

Is your company ready?

Next … start mapping out your company’s continuity plan.

Building upon my last post, I thought it would be a good idea to write a whole series of blog posts on how companies communicate quality internally. After all, isn’t that what ISO 9001 is all about—communication?

Because all of these areas were highlighted during our recent ISO 9001:2008 Certification audit—and, well, because I work here—I’m going to show you another one of Bizmanualz’s methods for communicating quality. (But as I continue in this series, I want to hear your techniques. Email me if you’d like me to interview you and brag about your awesome quality communication methods.)

If you’re in the quality field, you probably know what Kaizen methodology is. But for those like me, who had no clue, a Kaizen is the Japanese philosophy that focuses on continual improvement (thanks, Wikipedia. Also, check out this article from TheEconomist.com via @JeffreyJDavis.).

Bizmanualz Kaizen Forms

For Bizmanualz, a Kaizen is an improvement that we record, track, and follow up on to ensure effectiveness and sustainability. Kaizens can also be classified into corrective actions, preventive actions, or simple corrections.

In an effort to get the whole staff involved, we created a spreadsheet that tracks how many each employee has done for the month (the goal is two each) and the running total for the month. We also post our Kaizen forms in our office kitchen to communicate all of these improvements to the employees.

Every time we put up a new Kaizen, we also take one down and follow up to make sure the change actually resulted in a sustained improvement. Our Managing Director, Chris Anderson, even implemented an incentive system: At the end of each month, he rolls the die and one lucky Kaizen submitter receives $50! The more Kaizens implemented, the better the chance of winning.

Could your company implement something similar? How about department-wide? Let me know other ways your company is working on improving the communication process.

Information is important.  It helps us do our job.  But in how many places does information need to be kept?  We need to make sure the right information is available to people when they need it, but sometimes we put information in too many places – where it is not really necessary and not really used.  We just do it because it seems like a good idea at the time, or it makes things look official, or because we are just over-doing it.

When information is dynamic, you need to consolidate it as much as possible, because if the information is unnecessarily duplicated in a number of places, then every time it changes you have to locate everywhere the information exists and update it.  This leads to oversights and errors,  which then leads to outdated or incorrect information floating around.

We encountered this recently on some of our document lists that included revision level and revision date.  We use these lists for document control.  For example, we have a list of work instructions in the master work instruction file, so that when a work instruction is updated, we know where “deployed” copies of the work instructions are kept so they can be replaced with the latest revision.

And we like to have living documents, meaning we update them frequently.  But every time, say, a work instruction is updated, the list had to be updated too.   Sometimes it wasn’t.  So now the list had wrong information.

But the point is that it was unnecessary to have revision information on the list.  We do not use the list to track revisions, we use it to track location (which rarely changed).  Why have revision information there?   It is an unnecessary duplication of information.

We took the revision information off, and made updating work instructions (and other documents) easier because there is less overhead activity associated with it.  And less wrong information floating around.

We’ve been talking a lot about implementing an ISO 9001 Quality Management System over the past month or so. It’s something that Bizmanualz holds to be very important-not just for the certification status-but because a strong QMS means a more organized and efficient workplace.

That got me thinking back to my Internal Auditing training and what are the common deficiencies of most organizations. Typically, the No. 1 weakness of companies tends to be training records, but the problem can be one of a number of issues.

Do you document cross training? Are written job descriptions filed and easily accessible? Can your employee point to a filed certificate or form to prove certain training?

We keep fairly detailed training records. Never before had I been asked for copies of my diplomas or certificates of past training. But after reviewing the ISO 9001 Standard, it was clear why I had to dig them all up. Clause 6.2.1 states:

“Personnel performing work affecting product [or service*] quality shall be competent on the basis of appropriate education, training, skills, and experience.”

*added by our Quality Manager

In our records, that means each person has a folder containing his or her job description, diplomas or other education certificates, training certificates or on-the-job training records, and resumes stating skills and experience.

To supplement those records and keep them updated, our staff members have gotten into the habit of using on-the-job and group training forms every time a new skill is picked up or cross training occurs. Another way to record training is to have your manager vouch for you, signing a memo that records training took place. It doesn’t have to be formal; it just has to be there.

These are easy ways to comply with the standard. Any other suggestions for compliance? I’d like to hear your thoughts.

In essence, according to my dictionary, the terms are interchangeable.  I have heard some explanations that continuous implies not interrupted while continual implies prolonged succession.   Merriam-Webster on-line makes that distinction as well, using the example of showers over the weekend.  Continuous showers means the rain will never stop.  Continual showers means that the rain will start and stop regularly over the weekend.

So continual seems to be the term that is most appropriate when it comes to organization’s improving.  Improvement typically happens in spurts or stops and starts;  improvement doesn’t constantly happen without interruption.

More importantly, however, continual is the appropriate term  for organizations employing the ISO  9001 QMS.  The ISO 9001 Standard always uses the term “continual improvement,” so that is the term I have come into the habit of using just to be consistent with the language in the standard.

It is interesting, though, that continual improvement has the more appropriate implication and is used in the ISO 9001 Standard, yet continuous improvement has become the more frequently used term.

Now you know why I prefer continual improvement.  Which do you use?  Should we continue to use them interchangeably, or recognize the subtle differences?

Most business owners at this point understand the importance of a website, not only for exposure, but also as the primary distribution channel for his or her products. Perhaps your website is your product.

So how much time have you invested in the success of your site? If your website was built more than a few years ago without any major redesigns or upgrades since then, you probably have a usability issue. This is especially true if your website is your actual product, such as a subscription-based information database or an online community.

Websites should be ever-evolving, and that doesn’t mean simply adding a new page or set of pages when you launch a new product. It means that it has to adapt to the habits and trends of your users.

For example, your online community or web-based product should be accessible via mobile device if it is to be truly useful for your audience. (Does anything online not have an iPhone app these days?)

Image By Paul Veugen used under Creative Commons License

And on a lower level, ask someone who has never seen your website to scan the homepage. Where are their eyes drawn? Do they immediately understand the message? If they have to login, do they understand what to do or do they have a way to lookup their login information? Time how long it takes them to find a way to contact the company.

An out-of-date website is an irrelevant website. It will not attract new users. It’s important that you understand your users’ browsing habits and adjust your website accordingly. For ways to maintain that kind of constant customer feedback and rework, see my previous post on Agile product development.