Welche Rolle spielt quality and continuous improvement bei und wie kann es langfristig zur Unternehmensentwicklung beisteuern? In dieser englischsprachigen PEX Network Roundtable Discussion debattieren Vince Pierce, Senior Vice-President of Global Business Transformation Office Depot, Estelle Clark, Business Assurance Director Lloyd’s Register, und Gregory North, Vice-President Xerox Corporate Lean Six Sigma and Business Transformation, wie sie die Funktion von quality and continuous improvement in der heutigen Ära des beschleunigten Wandels einschätzen. >>HIER können Sie die Roundtable Discussion herunterladen: http://bit.ly/Pierce_Roundtable

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PEX Network Business Insights
Quality & Continuous Improvement in an Age of Transformation
Quality & Continuous
Improvement in an Age of
Transformation

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Quality & Continuous Improvement in an Age of Transformation
INTRODUCTION:
To say that the world has become smaller, faster,
flatter, is somewhat of an understatement.
Consider this:
Until little over five years ago Nokia, Research in
Motion (Blackberry) and Motorola controlled over
60% of the smartphone market. Today, the once
almighty Blackberry now has a paltry 2.9% of the
smartphone market and Nokia, having joined
focuses with Microsoft has just over 3.2%, (Q1
2013). And in a sign of just how quickly a
company’s fortunes can change, the number of
users with phones working on Android operating
systems has grown by nearly 80% in the last year
alone (from 59.1% in Q1 2012 to 75% today).
Emerging technologies, globalization, and a half-decade
old economic crisis whose reverberations
continue to be felt today mean that change seems
to be coming at us fast and furious. This means
that companies must frequently adapt and evolve
their business and operating models. But
sometimes gradual evolution is not enough. Today,
there has never been a greater need for more
radical transformation, more often.
We’ve seen, for instance, whole industries
transformed by digital technology. Ten years ago,
few in the music industry would have predicted
the impact that a couple computer nerds working
at a company named after a fruit would have on
their industry. The book publishing industry is
today going through the same transformation.
Quality and continuous improvement approaches
grew up in the twentieth century. The era of mass
manufacturing required rigorous, methodical
approaches to ensure predictable outcomes on
safety and quality. The pursuit of continuous
improvement became codified as a set of
management practices first embodied by the
Toyota Production System and then Lean
manufacturing. The main principle behind
continuous improvement was that small,
incremental changes would yield massive results
over time.
Those practices are still valid today and have since
spread beyond the borders of manufacturing
companies to just about every industry on the
planet. But at a time when just about everything is
in flux, what can quality and continuous
improvement do to better support the business
transformation agenda?
In this PEX Network roundtable discussion, Vince
Pierce, Senior Vice-President of Global Business
Transformation at Office Depot, Estelle Clark,
Business Assurance Director at Lloyd’s Register and
Gregory North, Vice-President at Xerox Corporate
Lean Six Sigma and Business Transformation
discuss where they see quality and continuous
improvement heading in today’s era of
transformative change.

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Quality & Continuous Improvement in an Age of Transformation
“Continuous improvement is a
mindset. It’s more of a verb. It is an
activity that happens pervasively in
the business everywhere we go.”
- Vince Pierce, SVP Global Business
Transformation, Office Depot

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Quality & Continuous Improvement in an Age of Transformation
HOW WOULD YOU DEFINE QUALITY, CONTINUOUS
IMPROVEMENT AND TRANSFORMATION?
Vince Pierce, Senior Vice
President Global Business
Transformation, Office Depot: I
define the concepts of quality,
continuous improvement, and
transformation very differently. I’ll start with
continuous improvement: it is incremental in
nature - it’s not breakthrough - and it should be
pervasive in nature. I tend to think of local,
autonomous improvement, where every process
gets improved every day, very, very tactically.
These are small improvements, small barriers,
small countermeasures that, over time,
accumulate and make a heck of a difference to an
organization. Continuous improvement is a
mindset. It’s more of a verb. It is an activity that
happens pervasively in the business everywhere
we go.
This is in contrast to transformation, which is
breakthrough in nature. Although I believe you can
apply transformation at multiple levels to an
enterprise, a division of a business or even a
process, for me, transformation always has some
element of strategy, people, process and
technology.
My definition of quality is very focused on the
quality aspects of a product or service, whether it
be accuracy or quality of craftsmanship. I tend to
think of quality as how well do we do it? Or how
well do we make something?
Estelle Clark, Business Assurance
Director at Lloyd’s Register: For
me, quality is about something
that’s organization-wide; it’s an
organization-wide approach to
understanding precisely what your customers
need and then being able to regularly – that’s
consistently – deliver those solutions within
budget, on time and, increasingly in today’s world,
I think, that quality also needs to encompass
“minimum loss to society”. There’s a sustainability
obligation there also, in relation to quality.
I agree with what Vince has said in relation to
transformation and continuous improvement. But
one more thought from me on continuous
improvement: I think that continuous
improvement is largely about culture. It’s about
making sure that everyone in the organization
understands that they have the ability and an
obligation to look for changes and things that may
improve things day by day. This is incremental, for
sure. But the person closest to the work needs to
understand that this responsibility [for continuous
improvement] is a key part of their job.
Gregory North, Vice President
Lean Six Sigma, Xerox: I’m
responsible and have the
privilege of working within the
Xerox Corporation, globally. To
really help define what we need for competencies
in our corporation to drive quality and continuous
improvement and then enable those competencies
at all levels across all our businesses. It’s an
exciting place to be, Xerox is in the process of a
very public transformation; moving from a strong,
innovative technology leader, to one that is a
services-led technology-driven business. That
means our very business model and our offering is
in transformation and as a result everything we do
in the corporation, from a whole-scale change in
our offering to a change in the way we think about
delivering that offering is, in a sense, up for grabs.
It’s a sweet spot for the area of thinking about our
business from a quality and continuous
improvement standpoint, in that, really, process is
at the center of what we’re doing. Our work here
at Xerox is designed to help our leadership team
and our employees across the corporation make
that journey successfully.