Quality Circle
A Voluntary group of employees who work on similar tasks or
share a similar area of responsibility to improve products or processes
- Work on the principle that employee participation in decision-making & problem-solving improves the quality of work
- Encourage to elect the leaders towards the end of the training period
- Agree to meet on a regular basis to discuss & solve problems related to work
- All members of a Circle need to receive training
- Members need to be empowered
- Members need to have the support of Senior Management
The Japanese description of the effectiveness of a quality
circle is expressed as:
‘It is better for one hundred people to take one step
than for one person to take a hundred’
Seven Basic Quality Circle Tools
Dr.
Ishikawa advocates of the use of ‘seven basic tools’ of quality control
- Pareto Analysis - Which are the big problems?
- Cause & effect diagram - What causes the problem?
- Stratification - How is the data made up?
- Check sheets - How often it occurs or is done?
- Histograms - What do overall variations look like?
- Scatter charts - What do the relationships between factors?
- Process control charts - Which variations to control & how?
Requirements of Quality Circles
- Training
- Management Support
- Recognition System
Benefits of Quality Circles
- A direct pay-off (cost/benefits)
- An operator to manager dialogue (involvement, participation, communication)
- A manager to manager dialogue (awareness)
- An operator to operator dialogue (attitudes)
- A quality minded (product quality & reliability, prevention of non-conformance)
- The personal development of the participants
Reasons for Failure of Quality Circles
- Inadequate training
- Unsure of purpose
- Not truly voluntary
- Lack of management interest
- Quality circles are not really empowered to make decisions
- The quality circles have been started in isolation & not part of a wider program of company-wide continuous improvement
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