The PI Program: A Case Study

What culture means is the norms of behavior and shared values among a group of people. Culture involves three components

• what people think

• what they do

• And the material products they produce.

As a result it can be concluded that mental processes and employee’s beliefs, knowledge, and values are parts of culture. A successful introduction and implementation of a PI program requires some changes in the culture of the organization and a change in the attitudes of its employees. Employees have to be motivated and accept responsibility for the quality of their own work. Where for example the history of Six Sigma application in General Electric showed that Employees created a burden during the introduction of six sigma, due to a misunderstanding

Projects are basically driven by customer requirements and should be oriented towards them.

A good understanding of the organization and its linkage to various business activities has a major impact of linking the PI program towards the customer clients. The process of linking the PI program to the customer is divided into two main steps:

1. Identifying the core processes, defining the key outputs of these processes and defining the key customers that they serve.

2. Identifying and defining the customer needs and requirements. An. Quality function deployment is a powerful technique to understand the requirements of customers and translate them into design or engineering requirements. In the service industry, the customer requirements are often ambiguous, subjective and poorly defined.

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Beside the involvement of customers suppliers also must be involved because it can lead to strengthen the connection between the supplier and customer which eventually improves the quality of the services/products. This requires the fine tuning of the supply chain management for the above mentioned relationship for the implementation of the PI program.

Thus, to be able to compete with other organizations, a company must utilize its resources (material, labor, money, information) in the most efficient way to gain the output in the form of a product or a service, a manufacturing company is oriented towards standardization where manufactured goods are generally standardized, and the Operations management in the manufacturing industry typically has only one thing to say about variability: It must be eliminated. It is learned as the enemy of