Posts Tagged ‘resources’

Welcome to the tenth post in this 12-part series on QUALITY, titled #QUALITYtweet – 12 Ideas to Build a Quality Culture.

Here are the first nine posts, in case you would like to go back and take a look:

1. Quality #1: Quality is a long term differentiator
2. Quality #2: Cure Precedes Prevention
3. Quality #3: Great People + Good Processes = Great Quality
4. Quality #4: Simplifying Processes
5. Quality #5: Customers are your “Quality Partners”
6. Quality #6: Knowing what needs improvement
7. Quality #7: Productivity and Quality
8. Quality #8: Best Practices are Contextual
9. Quality #9: Quality of Relationship and Communication

#QUALITYtweet Formal inspections can be a

huge waste of resources if you have not invested

in getting it right the first time

The goal of any process improvement initiative is to prevent same problems from occurring again. New problems are an opportunity to identify areas of improvement but same problems occurring repetitively is a sign of stagnation.

As someone rightly said, “Quality can never be inspected in a product; it has to be built first.” Processes have to help identify the quality expectations from the customers and translate those expectations into a practical action plan to build/verify quality constantly.

Inspections done at the tail end of product life cycle can eat a huge chunk of your budget because later the problems are found, costlier the resolutions. On top of that, if you have not “engineered” quality in a product, inspections can be a huge waste. You can never verify something you have not built upfront.

In manufacturing world, it is very unlikely to find that a component is inspected after it is integrated in the product. The very idea of inspecting everything after completing all product development is a dangerous one – one that has many business and financial risks associated with it.

This is where “prevention” is always better than “cure”.

Don’t get me wrong. Inspections are still one of the best ways to find problems. The timing of inspection is very important.

When inspections are done earlier in development process:

• Fixing problems is less costly
• Early identification of critical risks helps you manage them proactively
• Lower risk of failure at the end

Following are some very simplified guidelines on how inspection activity can be leveraged to generate value and lower risks for your customers. Each one of these points can be a process in itself.

• Know customer’s quality expectations early and educate team
• Clarify the exact customer requirements (and be ready for change)
• Give thoughtful consideration to a robust product design
• Plan actions to ascertain that quality expectations are built in the product
• Inspect Early and Inspect Often in cycles
• Each cycle of early inspection reduces risk of failure
• With this, final cycles of inspection can focus on “value-delivered-to-customer” rather than “defects-found-at-the-tail-end”.

The process of inspection can be your biggest asset if you have invested early efforts in building quality and then inspecting it. Else, it can be a huge waste.  Reduce this waste and you will automatically start forming a culture where “building quality” always takes precedence over inspecting. Your journey towards a quality-oriented culture begins there

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Tagged as: active garage, asset, business, customer, defects, development, engineer, inspection, integration, manufacturing, product, qaspire, quality, resources, services, stagnation, tanmay vora, tnvora, value

“The starting point of all achievement is desire. Keep this constantly in mind.”
-Napoleon Hill

A disciple asked his teacher ‘Sir,How can I see God’.  The teacher said ‘Come, I will show you’ and took the disciple to a lake. Both the teacher and the disciple got into the lake and suddenly the teacher pressed the student’s head into the water. After a few moments.. he released it and asked the student how he felt. The student panting for breath.. said he felt that he was about to die.. and while in the water, his one and only desire was to get a whiff of air. The Teacher said ‘Son, if you have the same amount of desire to see god..you will see him’.

Tagged as: business, career, character, configuration, Desire, entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship, intense, intense desire, napolean hill, relationship, resources, team, tools, vijay peduru

All too often companies find themselves with a brilliant strategy – on paper at least. When they try to implement the strategy, they run into obstacles such as channels, partners, technology, infrastructure, competition, or lack of resources. The reverse is also true. Companies can spend so much time executing that they lose sight of the business objective. They might end up with an awesome website, but no real results.

Effective brands, that is, brands that deliver on their promise and help companies sell more stuff, are those that find the right balance between strategy and tactics, between images and words, between effect and affect.  Every brand is made up of several different components:  visuals, messages, voice, and personality, for example.  Each of these is integrated into specific deliverables like a company logo or tagline or photographic style.  The trick is to find the right combination and then apply them consistently throughout everything you do.

It starts with strategy – how will you achieve your objectives?  Depending on your brand promise some strategies are going to be more effective than others.  For example, you probably won’t see Nascar investing in “environmentally-friendly” campaigns; you would expect it from Starbucks. There are lots of different ways to achieve your objectives.  Make sure that your strategies align with your brand promise and that you can actually implement them.  This is what I call the “duh” test.  Run the strategies by a colleague, friend or spouse and see what they think.  If they ask you a question and your reaction is “duh”…you might want to rethink the strategy.

Next come the tactics – what exactly will you do to implement the strategy?  If your strategy was to grow your market share by expanding into new markets, a tactic might be to partner with a complementary brand in the new market to jump start your brand recognition.  This might require a joint email campaign, billboards and local ads on radio and TV.  The key is to align the tactics with the strategy so that everything is in support of the brand.  Otherwise, you end with a lot of random activities – all of them are probably pretty cool on their own – but together they don’t deliver.

To be valuable, strategy must be practical, and tactics must be integrated. With the right balance of strategy and tactics, your brand will grow and so will your business

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Tagged as: 42 Rules, active garage, advertisement, Branding, campaigns, channels, competition, duh, infrastructure, laura lowell, nascar, objectives, obstacles, partners, radio, resources, starbucks, Strategy, tactics, technology, tv