This report went back to the very beginning of the ISO 9000 story in Vietnam and traces its development. ISO 9000 helped Viet Nam to carve out a place of its own in the world market. How back in 1995, ISO 9000 could be considered a nation building tool for Viet Nam to release the Dragon from its shackle of poor management. ISO 9000 is still the shortest way to prepare an organization to become world class with top management commitment to make the “Quality Management Principles” the basis of all its decisions. All that an organization with a certified organization needs to do to get what it can use of the system at any time is to follow the simple rules presented in chapter 7 of this report ensure that all defects are made visible as starting point for improvement. Competency in QC problem solving is absolutely necessary.
1. A BIT OF HISTORY
At the end of February 1995, a 4-DAY TOP MANAGEMENT TRAINING SEMINAR was organized by the Department of Sciences, Technology and Environment of HCM City, in association with CAM BUI & Associates of New Zealand. The Conference received wholehearted support from the Office of the Prime minister and STAMEQ. It was jointly chaired by the Mr. Trương Tân Sang, the then President of the HCM People Committee and The Hon Roger F.H. Maxwell, Minister of Business Development and Immigration of New Zealand. Speakers included the Who & Who of quality movement in the Asia Pacific Region, such as the Asia Pacific General manager of BHP, Vice Chairman of BP, The secretary and president of New Zealand Quality Association, Telarc NZ ..This conference kicked off the ISO 9000 campaign for HCMC. THE FIRST VIETNAM NATIONAL QUALITY CONFERENCE in Hanoi, August 1995, probably triggered off the decision to make the building of ISO 9000 quality management system compulsory for Governmental organizations in early 1997. A decade has passed and what do we have as a result?
2. ACHIEVEMENTS
At the present, approximately 2800 organizations in Vietnam have been successful in achieving certification status for one of the ISO 9000/14000 quality systems. All organizations reported some improvement in business and operational efficiency and effectiveness at the conclusion of the quality management system building project. In fact in the early days of 1995/96, the requirements by STAMEQ which forced organizations to meet some of the requirements of ISO 9002:1987 when applying for product certification, already brought some marked improvement in the ways those organizations managed themselves. For the first time there was a link between Management and Quality in the mind of many Vietnamese managers.
Some sentiment of disappointment with respect to expectations from Quality Management Systems (QMS) started to emerge as early as the beginning of the 2000. This was confirmed by the results of several informal surveys carried out by various quality related organizations and widely publicized on the press in 2002/03. The impression was that less than 20% of certified organizations were satisfied with the benefits brought to them from their QMS. And yet, since 2000, nearly one thousand more organizations have gone ahead to obtain ISO 9000 certification for their QMS. Why this apparent contradiction?
3. WHY BACK IN 1995/1997, ISO 9000 WAS THE BEST NATION BUILDING TOOL FOR VIETNAM?
Management as a discipline of knowledge that helps managers to make use of its human resources for the effective and efficient utilization of all other resources such as plant and equipment, knowledge of its staff and of the world at large and markets opportunities to create a customer was only recently recognized as deserving attention in Vietnam. Management is the organ of a business. Its main function is that of an agent of change.
Before, in the days of central planning, Management was only responsible to produce targeted quantities of goods with the resources allocated by the central planners. Management was synonymous to enforce conformance to a set rules and regulations. These rules are internally focused. Customers have no choice and their satisfaction did not intrude into business decisions. Managers were vainly trying to “control” results through exhortation, very few paid much attention to the managing and improving the processes that produced those results. The end result was shortage of all kinds of consumer goods of acceptable quality.
Vietnam was in a hurry to enter into the world market. Vietnam could not afford the time and expenses to send ten of thousands of managers to overseas universities to learn about management. There was no guarantee that, after several years of business management education and training from the most respectable “business colleges”, that these people will be able to change the entrenched management style, the direction and habit of their fellow managers and employees back at work.
If there was some thing that could force the focus of managers and staff of all organizations in the country from its this inward looking habit into an outward/customer-focused stand, in a relatively short time of one to two years, that thing was the building and implementing a QMS to meet the requirements of ISO 9000 standards and to achieve certification status by an internationally qualified certification body!
Vietnamese leaders did well to have made ISO 9000 certification compulsory for all government-owned organizations, as early as 1997. Now we are reaping the benefits of this wise decision in greatly improved quality of products and services, in all walks of life.
4. THE BURDEN OF CHANGE.
A QMS provides a framework to enable managers and supervisors of a business enterprise (or Government department) to share responsibility in implementing and controlling the necessary processes for meeting the requirements and expectations of its customers and stake-holders, in a consistent, effective and efficient manner. The Standard does this by forcing organizations to implement measures to meet “ standard requirements” for key processes. These “requirements” are the key points in each main business process that present the world’s best practices in each important result areas of business operation. Key points are things –elements- in a process or process step that make or break it. When any key point is not properly met, some output functions of a process would be impaired in performance, be its quality, cost, delivery time, safety or feelings. However, the Standard has never shown how to meet these key points, except that they must be met!
When customer’s requirements and expectations changed, the processes must be realigned to create modified or new outputs to satisfy the new expectations of the customer. Unfortunately, because ISO 9000 QMS is a documented system which is by nature resistant to change. This is the first sign of trouble in the long run.
Customer needs and wants are not the only thing that changes. The ISO 9000 Standard itself also changed. From its inception in 1987, the Standard has been up-dated twice, the first in 1994, the second in 2000. The changes were mainly brought about to make the Standard more suitable to the needs of organizations with maturing quality management system. The direction of change has been to provide greater and greater degree of freedom of action to process owners. The standards has moved from the focus on conformance to “procedures” in 1987 to ensure process capacity in 1994 and to customer satisfaction and system improvement in 2000. The impetus of the change may still elude the attention of teachers, consultants and auditors of ISO 9000. One can reasonably expect the ordinary managers to be even more reluctant to realign their systems than the consultants and the auditors!
In the early days of ISO 9000, in New Zealand for example, the time it took a business to build and certify a QMS could take up to two years or more. This long time span could freeze a business into inactivity, especially when it was managed by conservative management. Coupled with the inertia of documentation this adds up to even more resistance to up-date the system to meets the challenge of changes. ISO 9001:2000 took away some of this documentation burden and helped to focus attention on the building of a system to manage quality, rather than the documentation of the existing system to meet documentation requirements of the Standard.
5. BACK TO BASICS
What kind of benefits that an organizations can expect from building a QMS to meet ISO 9000 requirements? The answer is provided by clause 1.1 of ISO 9001:2000 international Standard, which states:
“This Standard specifies requirements for a quality management system where an organization:
a) needs to demonstrate its ability to consistently provide product that meets customer and applicable regulatory requirements, and
b) aims to enhance customer satisfaction through the effective application of the system, including processes for continual improvement of the system and the assurance of conformity to customer and applicable regulatory requirements.”
What kind of organization would be able to consistently meets customer requirements and all applicable regulatory requirements? Further more, if this organization is continually engaged in improvements of its performance to enhance customer satisfaction? Such an organization would certainly be considered an excellent organization or world class. Also, such an organization would not suffer from the inertia that prevents it from keeping its system up-dated to meet the challenge of changes.
From a structural point of view, there is nothing wrong with what the Standard stands for. The answer for under-achievement of QMS must be found elsewhere.
From our joint experience as consultant and certification auditor for the last decade, it is safe to say that at the time of a successful certification by an internationally recognized Certification body, even the worst organization would have had a QMS that marginally meets the requirements of 1.1 (a) i.e. “ to demonstrate its ability to consistently provide product that meets customer and applicable regulatory requirements”
The areas of weakness usually lies in “Management responsibility”, especially in top management commitment to Policy management. For the majority of cases, the evidence of the building and implementation of “processes for continual improvement” was vague or absent. This was not too bad if ones took into account of the assumed role of “partner for quality maintenance and improvement” of Certification Organization to its client. Had the certified organization received this mentoring and supervising service from the Certifier and if, indeed, the client really knew what to improve and desired the improvement, perhaps, we would have an entirely different story? We will explore this hypothesis further in the remainder of this report.
6. WHY DOES A QMS UNDER-ACHIEVES?
A Quality Management System is only the means to achieve business performance for organizations which are customer-focused. Even the best built system would not bring business performance if the process owners were not willing to take ownership of their processes and there was no commitment from Top Management.
On the other hand, what about those QMS that completely meet the requirements of the Standard? Can they be expected to ensure continued growth of the business enterprise in the changing world? What else might be needed to do that? Are we expecting too much from ISO 9000? Do we use a single purpose tool to do all types of jobs? The answer may be found in the conundrum of “the singer or the song”
A QMS is only a framework, a means to the end of business performance. You may look at it as a “Plan” for creating quality and securing customer satisfaction. However the documented QMS is really only a part of the P in the PDCA cycle of business operation. The other part of that P is the ever changing “Quality Objectives” that must be achieved by various departments of the organizations to implement the “Quality policy” that must be established by Top Management. The Standard also requires that the Quality policy must be reviewed at every Management Review meeting, which is carried out at least once a year. As mentioned above, this is an areas of weakness in most organization, due to lack of Top Management Commitment.
While Vietnamese organizations took to the task of building the “documented system” with jest and tenacity (P), very few pay much attention to the next stage of the Quality process –implementation of the QMS (the D of PDCA). Omitting this has helped organizations to shave off project implementation time, allowing it to go for certification in record time of several months to a year, compared with 1-2 years by overseas experience. Unfortunately the penalty to pay is very heavy. The QMS remains documents kept in drawers or locked cupboard. Organizations spent very little time or not at all to train employees in the working of the documented procedures. The consequence was the best practice presented by the documented procedures become the company’s best kept open secrets from its own employees!
While some internal audit was conducted as required for certification, the importance of auditing to ensure “conformance” to requirements of the Standard and of the organization’s standards has not been properly appreciated by managers of most organizations. More frequently, the required pre-certification audits were carried out by ISO consultants. This was a sad story with respect to system audit. Even more sorry story could be told with respect to process and product monitoring and measurements – meeting requirements of 8.2.3 and 8.2.4 of ISO 9001:2000. While product measuring and monitoring –inspection (KCS)- is a familiar concept and practiced by the majority of manufacturers, the requirements is applicable for all process outputs, including supporting processes, such as training, sales order taking or any other administrative processes, including monitoring and measurement of “quality objectives” achievement.
From numerous observations of certification auditors at work, in almost all cases, the “monitoring and measurement of product” with respect to the manager’s process of projects supervision –works allocated to his/her own staff- was never mentioned. It has been a rare experience to meet a manager in Viet Nam who had a system to monitor progress of works allocated to his own subordinates, nor have the manager had a system to monitor the progress of all works allocated to him. And yet this is what “Management” is all about: to get works done on time through other people!
Process monitoring and measurement (when applicable) has been generally neglected, except for manufacturing operation where the monitoring and measuring of process parameters have been recognized as essential to produce conforming products. This is where the ability to identify “key points” or influencing factors, is most important. For example, when opening a bank account, the correct name and identity numbers are the key points to ensure trouble free transaction by the bank customer in subsequent dealings. Key points as mentioned elsewhere are those elements – things- that make or break the job. The key point or process control parameters must be made known to workers and they must be trained and tested for competency in implementing these key points correctly, if the right product characteristics were to be produced as desired.
If product and process monitoring and measurements were not carried out, neither conforming product would be delivered, nor quality be assured. While Japanese management is obsessed with the motto of “MAKING DEFECTS VISIBLE”, Vietnamese management seems to be more concerned with hiding faults and errors. Chance is that whoever discover defect and report it would be blamed for letting it happens! This may be a cultural trait? Could this be the result of a recognition and reward system that is result or output focused and not process focused?
Vietnam is not the only country where process control was not actively practiced. Process control has been the best kept Japanese secret. The West, the author of ISO 9000 Standard, only begun to appreciate and popularized the significance of the process approach which has been practiced by the Japanese for half a century, as late as 1994 or there about. As recently as 2004, some certification organizations in Vietnam started to train its auditors in process approach to QMS!
The most important monitoring and measurement requirement from ISO 9001:2000 Standard is clause 8.2.1 “Customer satisfaction”. The focus of ISO 9001:2000 is the creation and enhancement of customer satisfaction. The measurement of customer perception of the organization’s product/service quality provides feedback as to the performance of the QMS. Unfortunately, most organizations only provide superficial response to this requirement. This is not altogether surprising, taking into account of the fact that most organization hardly get pass the P of the PDCA of business operation.
The purpose of monitoring and measurement, whether of product conformance, process stability and capacity or customer satisfaction, is to make defects visible or finding out shortcomings in the output of business processes or deviations in process control parameters. Defect in a product is defined as any thing that impairs product functions to customer. However, monitoring or measurement would have no meaning or value unless there are criteria to compare and corrective and preventive action taken when significant discrepancies found. First these criteria or targets must be determined for all key process control points (output) and process check points (input) and communicated to process operator. As well, measuring or monitoring methods must be determined and workers must be trained to apply these methods. Records of the results of monitoring and measurement must be approved by people reponsible.
The fact that both the DO and CHECK stages of the PDCA have not been given adequate attention in QMS implementation process, there is nothing available for process review and improvement. The song is great, the singer has never learn how to sing the song!
7. WHAT TO DO IN THE FUTURE TO MAKE THE BEST OF THE QMS?
7.1 Vietnamese have the saying: Whatever you want, heaven will give it you – Mong của nào, Trời trao của ấy. You get what you want. Look at another way: When as a child, while learning to ride a bike, one often run into the obstacle that one feared to hit. Why? Simply, it is because that where you were aiming your bike! The same applied with going for ISO 9000. For those who went to ISO 9000 just to obtain a certificate for whatever the reason, and not aiming at improving their competitiveness through quality of product and services, they already got what they sought and therefore should be satisfied with the certificate!
7.2 For those organizations that went for ISO 9001:2000 with the sincere hope of improving their competitiveness through quality, they may find most of the pointers to get more results out of their QMS by reading the first 21 pages of ISO 9000:2000 Standard Quality Management Systems – Fundamentals and Vocabulary. Pay special attention to the “Quality Management Principles”. Alternatively they could simply follow the advice to “Make Defects Visible” in all key business processes or activities and to apply their own QMS procedures on Control of Non-conforming product and Corrective Action, followed by Preventive Action for similar type of defects in other processes.
7.3 For the more systematic managers, the following complete package is proposed:
7.3.1 Build and Communicate Vision. Top Management must have a clear Vision or a mental image of the organization at a future time, and share with your employees or at least, key staff. These are the people that you must rely on to re-interpret this image into action plans to be carried out by the people they lead.
The Vision demands answer to the following questions: How will the organization look to its customers, employees and society at large. Who are going to its customers, what will they expect from the organization, what are of value to them from its product and service? How will the organization behave towards customers, employees and suppliers?
7.3.2 Establish Quality Policy. Top Management Team – Chief executive and divisional or departmental managers- must work together to establish the organization’s “Quality Policy”. This policy simply points out the strategies or things that must be strengthened, reduced, changed or created to put the organization in the right position to get a balanced performance in all 8 key results areas: Market standing; innovation; productivity; physical and financial resources; manager performance and development; worker performance and attitude; public responsibility. –Peter Drucker “The Practice of Management”. Only the areas of critical performance need be included in the Quality Policy, at any particular time.
7.3.3 Develop Quality Objectives. Each functional or divisional manager should study each policy statement and see how it affect its own performance and develop targets that must be achieved by its own sub-divisions or personnel to ensure that the objective of the policy statement will have received adequate support from the department concerned.
7.3.4 Review all processes to establish criteria of acceptance for process output characteristics and process inputs and control parameters. Review methods of monitoring and measurement for all products and processes. Ensure worker training are planned and carried out in order that all defects will be made visible. Take corrective and preventive action. You would have done it right if your staff can judge for themselves whether they have done a good job at each stage of the job.
7.3.5 Training your key staff in QC Problem Solving techniques and the required analytical tools, such as QC 7 old and new tools and Statistical techniques.
7.3.6 Have fun.
Bui Hong Cam - Vu Thi Tam
