How Quality Affects Profitability
By Don Lidster, DNL Farms Ltd.
W. Edwards Deming started the “quality movement” just after the World War II. The Japanese economy was in shambles after the war and desperately needed to generate good products. Deming was brought in to help them get on their feet. His philosophy was to make sure the quality was put in on the production line rather than throwing out the defective products at the end of the production line. The bottom line is Deming’s methods are what got the Japanese auto industry on the path it is on today.
Deming did not get into the "quality business" because it was the flavor of the month or because every one else was doing it. He insisted on quality because that was what it took to get into business and stay in business in the short run and the long run. Just look at the Japanese auto industry.
In his heralded 1992 book Future Edge – Discovering the New Paradigms of Success, futurist Joel Barker wrote that quality was going to be the price of admission in any industry in the 21 century. In other words, quality was going to be required to compete.
In the pork industry, we are striving to achieve quality to compete. We have PQA, TQA, CQA, PQA Plus and who knows how many more QA's to come. All these programs have honorable goals for sure but what puts the Q in any product? It is not an available program or slogan. It is people who are truly trained in the skills required in performing their assigned tasks who put quality into our products. It is that quality that gives our customers the assurance.
We would do well to look at Deming's 14 Points (Google it for a multitude of details). He had the radical suggestion of instituting training on the job (Point 6). He observed, back then, that workers often learned their job from another worker who was not properly trained either. Sound familiar? This reminds me of the old kid's party game where you sat in a circle and whispered something to the person next to you and that person whispered to the next and so on until the message made the full circle. Then we would all laugh at how the final message sounded relative to the original. It is no laughing matter when this approach is used to train staff members who are expected to turn out quality that will assure our customers.
Deming goes on to exhort the situation where new staff are forced to follow “unintelligible instructions” (his terms). Sound familiar again? I would add to that, instructions given over the shoulder of an overworked, harried supervisor as they are headed down the hallway to deal with another “fire” in the production line. Top that off with the chance that the “trainer” probably had little or no opportunity to be trained in how to train others and even less interest in being a trainer anyway. Many of our peak performers in our barns are keen on the work they do but don't hassle them by asking them to teach others. It is often the case on our farms that the new trainee is either being trained by the person exiting that position or by someone “filling in” for the person who has already exited that position. None of these provide a good scenario for training people to put quality into products that will assure our customer.
If we want to assure quality, we first have to assure training.
DNL Farms Ltd. is a consulting company from White Fox Saskatchewan that focuses on staff training. After completing their degrees in Agriculture, brief careers in industry and 20 years in the pig business, the principals, Don & Nancy Lidster have produced numerous training videos for their clientele as well as done extensive work with low stress pig handling. They can be contacted at dnlfarms@xplornet.com or (306) 276-5761.
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