Long-Term Productivity in Business Workers and Machinery
Productivity is important to every kind of business. This does not mean that every possible bit of work has to be squeezed out of every single worker until they drop into an exhausted heap on the assembly line. Indeed, this would certainly not be productive because having to replace on a continual basis workers who quit from being exhausted - not to mention having to settle disability suits - is hardly the goal of any business.
Productivity means getting the most out of one's machines and workers on a long-term basis. Sometimes this means that everyone has to put in overtime. Sometimes this means that people need to spend an afternoon staring out the window and thinking up new ideas. It all depends upon the business involved and the stage of a project that business and that worker is at.
Something that every business can benefit from in terms of increased productivity is an adaptation of the ISO 9000 standards. However, these standards are most effective if they are in fact adopted as part of an overall operations management strategy. Both points will be discussed below.
Most people outside of the world of industry have never heard of ISO 9000 Certification, and yet this system - and similar systems of standardization - are integral to a number of the activities that we pursue each day and are central to the way that business and industry will be conducted in the 21st century.
Quality Management
Much has been written about the process whereby a business (whether in the high-tech field or in one of the more traditional heavy industries) can create a system of quality management. While each type of industry and business must determine the details of quality management for itself and each individual business must fine tune those requirements for its own particular needs, it is possible to make some general statements about the process of quality control - which are all tied in more or less direct ways to a systematic application by the company's executives of the concept of standardization.
The business leader who wishes to run his or her business at anything approaching maximum efficiency must establish, document, implement, and maintain a quality management system and thereafter continually improve its effectiveness by:
Mapping, controlling and analyzing processes,
- providing the necessary resources,
- implementing and continually improving processes.
One of the axioms of quality control for the production management of a company or business has traditionally been summarized as taking care of the "five M's": men, machines, methods, materials, and money. The first of these is now obviously no longer properly an "M" since it must include women (of course, women have always done at least have of the labor in human societies), but the uniformity of the acronym remains appealing. Since the vast majority of manufacturing personnel work in the physical production of goods, "people management" is one of the production manager's most important responsibilities and takes precedence over the other four in terms of the quality management.
Although the five M's cover the range of the major tasks of production management, control summarizes its single most important issue. The production manager interested in quality management is in fact interested in quality control. That person must therefore plan and control the process of production so that it moves smoothly at the required level of output while meeting cost and quality objectives.
An essential part of this planning process in almost every case is the implementation of a standardization process like the ISO 9000. This cannot be overemphasized.
Quality process control has two major purposes, and these are the same regardless of the kind of industry or business that is involved. The first of these is to ensure that operations are performed according to plan, and second, a continuous monitoring and evaluation of the production plan to see if modifications can be devised to better meet "cost, quality, delivery, flexibility, or other objectives."
This process of continually updating and checking for needed modifications is one of the greatest strengths of the ISO system. Moreover, it is the "continuousness" of this process that is most responsible for the connection between productivity and ISO 9000 use.
While the ISO standardization system is updated annually, often good quality control must be updated on a daily or even an hourly basis. For example, when demand for a product is high enough to justify continuous production,...
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