Quality Circles/Gemba Kaizen Appreciation Training Course

What are Quality Circles?

"A Quality Circle is a small group of between three and twelve people who do the same or similar work, voluntarily meeting together regularly for about one hour per week in paid time, usually under the leadership of their own supervisor, and trained to identify analyse and solve some of the problems in their work, presenting solutions to management and, where possible, implementing solutions themselves." [Hutchins, D. Quality Circles Handbook. Pitman, 1985]

Duration: One day
Cost: on application
Dates: negotiable
Location: 'In house'

Quality Circles Appreciation Course Objectives:

In 2004 both Toyota and Honda announced that they have both set targets for 100% global participation of their workforce in Quality Circle activities with huge incentives (non financial) to do so. 
Also in the Far East, Quality Circles are very popular in Schools which link through the ICSQCC movement initiated by the City Montessori School in Lucknow India.
The Quality Circles movement itself is co-ordinated through the annual ICQCC conventions which are held annually throughout the Far East.
The reason why the West has such a jaundiced view of Quality Cirlces is because it has never understood them in the first place and this as true today as it was 20 years ago. 
This course is to show why organisations which do not have Quality Circles or something very similar, will always underachieve against rivals which do. How to build Quality Circles programmes into an organisation and causing the minimum disruption to existing initiatives. Answers to the cynics, how to get started and how to develop and sustain the improved performance.

Quality Circles Appreciation Course description:

The course is designed to make participants aware of the critically important features of the underlying philosophy, objectives, potential benefits, support structure and training required in order to successfully implement and sustain a company wide Quality Circles (Gemba Kaizen) programme.

The term Kaizen (which literally means 'improvement'. Gemba Kaizen means 'Workshop Improvement') confuses people into believing that this must be in some way intrinsically different from Quality Circles but it is not. The two are identical in every way. The term was brought to the West by a very perceptive Japanese Professor in the mid 1980s who recognised a market opportunity resulting from the insatiable appetite for all things Japanese at that time. He was also lucky or planned his marketing to coincide with the then reduced popularity of the term Quality Circles in the West. Those organisations that had made unsuccessful attempts to introduce Quality Circles but wanted to make a fresh start eagerly accepted the new term in order to avoid the bad name they had created for Quality Circles.

Benefits of Quality Circles (Gemba Kaizen)

Approximately 80% of work related problems in terms of cost are management solvable which means that 20% are not. Unless the workforce becomes fully involved in the business improvement process it follows that the organisation will always be some 20% at least below optimum performance which could be life threatening. 

Quality Circle activities enable the ultimate benefit from:

¢ Total Productive Maintenance - involvement of the workforce in process improvement.

¢ Lean manufacture includes all of the following participative concepts -

• SMED (Single Minute Exchange of Dies) and set up time reduction
• 5S/5C or CANDO.
• Autonomation (JIDOKA) - using single part production methods and the Kanban approach.
• Root Cause Analysis.
• Poke Yoke (mistake proofing).
• Quality related Cost reduction.
• Flexible Work groups.
• Improved overall performance

Please click below for registration form which may be faxed, emailed or mailed to DHI