“Translating need into requirements” is one of the important techniques used in customers’ satisfaction. Discuss the role of this...

role in continuous quality improvement
management:

Continuous improvement in a management context
means a never-ending effort to expose and eliminate root causes of problems. Usually, it
involves many incremental or small-step improvements rather than one overwhelming
innovation. From a Japanese perspective continuous improvement is the basis for their
business culture. Continuous improvement is a philosophy, permeating the Japanese
culture, which seeks to improve all factors related to the transformation process
(converting inputs into outputs) on an on-going basis. It involves everyone, management
and labour, in finding and eliminating waste in machinery, labour, materials and
production methods.

The Japanese word for continuous
improvement, kaizen, is often used interchangeably with the
term continuous improvement. From the Japanese
character kai, meaning change, and the
character Zen, meaning good, taken literally, it
means improvement.

Although kaizen is
a Japanese concept, many U.S. firms have adopted it with considerable success by
combining the best of traditional Japanese practices with the strengths of Western
business practice, in other words, by merging the benefits of teamwork with the
creativity of the individual. Some refer to its implementation in the West as lean
manufacturing since, when combined with the principles of just-in-time (JIT), kaizen or
continuous improvement forms the foundation for the concept of lean
manufacturing.

Implementations

The  title="Toyota Production System"
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System">Toyota Production
System is known for kaizen, where all line personnel are expected to stop
their moving production line in case of any abnormality and, along with their
supervisor, suggest an improvement to resolve the abnormality which may initiate a
kaizen.

The
cycle of kaizen activity can be defined
as:

• Standardize an operation and
  activities.


• Measure the standardized operation (find
  cycle time and amount of in-process inventory)


• Gauge
  measurements against requirements


• Innovate to meet
  requirements and increase productivity


• Standardize the
  new, improved operations


• Continue cycle ad
  infinitum

This is also known as
the  href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shewhart_cycle">Shewhart cycle, Deming
cycle, or PDCA.
Other techniques used in conjunction with PDCA include  href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys">5 Whys, which is a form of root
cause analysis in which the user asks "why" to a problem and its answer five successive
times. There are normally a series of root causes stemming from one problem, and they
can be visualized using fishbone diagrams or tables.