SQT Blog

It appears that distraction is very much a Health & Safety at work issue. Quoting from a recent Times article

Pilots of a Northwest Airlines jetliner that overshot its destination by 240km (150 miles) last week told US investigators they became distracted during an extended discussion of crew scheduling that included their use of personal laptops, officials said yesterday.

“The pilots said there was a concentrated period of discussion where they did not monitor the plane or calls from [air-traffic controllers] even though both stated they heard conversation on the radio,” the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said after interviewing the pair.

“Both said they lost track of time,” the safety board said in a report on their investigation …

Whilst we’re not all pilots and we’re not all in charge of critical machines, I wonder how often is plain distraction, a cause of accidents at work?

The BRC (British Retail Consortium) Global Food Safety Standard has been the benchmark for many food manufacturing companies over the past ten years. This standard, though difficult to achieve, was a blessing in disguise for food business operators (FBO). For the first time UK retailers, who are fiercely competitive on many issues such as price, product availability, choice, customer service, etc, had pooled their technical resources to develop an International Food Safety Standard which was well written, user friendly and prescriptive. It allowed FBOs to understand the retailer mindset and to prepare for third party audits.

However it now appears that Tesco are going it alone with the Tesco Food Manufacturing Standard (TFMS).

58 references to Risk Assessment is extremely demanding and food safety professionals need to be comfortable when carrying them out. These are the challenging questions being posed by third party auditors:

1) How do you, (the FBO) risk assess your pre-requisite programme?
2) How do you determine your Internal Audit frequencies based on risk?
3) Do you risk assess based on your controls working or your controls failing?
4) How do you risk assess the various allergens you may have on site?

The demands that the TFMS is placing on FBOs are significant and technical departments need to be competent and confident that all necessary control measures are in place.

SSE (Specialised Sterile Environments) and SQT had their second successful gathering of the Cleanroom Technology Network Group on Sept 17th in the Radisson Hotel, Athlone with over 55 attendees from companies all over Ireland. The idea behind the network is to create an informal forum where people working within cleanroom environments can come together to discuss topics and areas of similar interest, share experiences and generally learn from each other to create a support network that will benefit all, in these challenging times.

Many different industries were represented including; medical device, pharmaceutical, hospitals, orthopaedics, cleanroom supporting industries and services such as packaging, garment apparel and laundry, design and validation, facility management, cleaning, laboratory testing, training and auditing.

In other words just about everything you would need to build and maintain your cleanroom to the highest standard possible.

Presentations were given on a number of different topics including; challenges faced during the initial set up of a cleanroom, cleanroom certification and classification preparation, audit findings and preventive action in relation to contamination control, cleanroom energy and cost management and environmental monitoring.

We look forward to our Christmas meeting on Dec 3rd where the following topics will be included; Cleanroom Design, Cleanroom Apparel and Rotation of Chemicals within Cleanrooms. As well though it will be a chance to network with many new people in an informal, relaxed atmosphere.

Times are changed and it’s certainly considered a buyers market out there at the moment. While this is true of those buying houses or second-hand cars, it’s also true across all goods and services. Early 2009 saw the mass exodus to customers migrate to the north to purchase goods. A new price sensitive customer has appeared, one who had not been seen during the Celtic Tiger years.

So what does this mean? Customer needs change over time. What was relevant last year may not be what customers now want. What were customer needs for mobile phones ten years ago? What are those needs today? Organizations must continuously listen to the ‘Voice of the Customer’ and have a willingness to change in order to deliver those customer needs.

With Six Sigma it all starts with the Customer – Who are those customers and what do they want? What’s really important to them and what’s the nice to have?

The Kano Model states that all customer needs can be classified as Dissatisfiers, Satisfiers and Delighters.

The Kano model can be used to identify where to focus Six Sigma projects in your organization. For example, customers may want to their insurance premium costs to be kept to a minimum (Dis-satisfier) yet don’t mind if their policy takes 10 days to issue (Delighter) but they still want to receive the standard policy (Satisfier). So a Green Belt or Black Belt could review the core processes which support the costs of issuing policies and reduce waste or re-work in order to reduce policy costs. This would meet the basic customer need and ensure they are not ‘Dissatisfied’. Issuing standard polices will ensure they are ‘Satisfied’. Finally, if you’ve achieved all this and still can issue policies by 7 working days then you would be going above their expectations and ‘delighting’ them.

With some organizations now advertising their Irish or UK based call centres for handling customer calls perhaps they’ve been listening to their ‘Voice of the Customer’? Perhaps they identified out-sourced call centres as a customer dissatisfier and made the decision to change their business to meet their customer needs.