A Quality Dragon Flexes Its Muscles
I recently attended the fifth Shanghai International Symposium on Quality. The conference featured an impressive list of speakers from around the globe. What amazed me most, however, was China's own progress in the quality field during recent years.
I started working with the Chinese government in the 1980s, when the strong centralized Communist government was apparent everywhere. The roads were a sea of bicycles, and parking areas were filled with thousands of bikes without a single lock on them. We didn't stay in hotels; we stayed in government guest houses. There were two kinds of currency--one for foreign visitors which they could redeem in U.S. dollars, and one for Chinese nationals, who couldn't.
My first lecture in China was very sophisticated and included the latest stress techniques to screen early-life failures. It missed the mark because what the audience wanted to know were basics like, "What does a quality engineer do?"
During the following years, I led teams of quality professionals who toured China and lectured on quality methodologies. The Chinese people were eager to learn, excited to meet people from outside China and willing to try something new. We worked with 200 top leaders from China, showing them how to apply quality principles. It was China's way of demonstrating that top management must lead their quality movement.
Now here it is 20 years later, and China has made 75 years of progress. Shanghai is the leading industrial city in the world, more modern than Chicago or San Francisco. BAO Steel is the biggest steel producer in the world.
As China's industrial hub, Shanghai has set a goal of becoming the leading quality city in the country--and maybe anywhere. On this trip I visited the new headquarters of the Shanghai Association for Quality. Think of it as the Shanghai branch of the China Quality Association, which is like the San Francisco chapter of ASQ. But there's a big difference in the way Madame Tang Xiaofen runs the operation. The Shanghai Academy of Quality Management and the Shanghai Association for Quality are located together in two six-story marble buildings in the heart of the city. These magnificent buildings far surpass ASQ headquarters and all the quality offices in Europe. Officially opened in fall of 2004, each of the two new buildings contain 3,000 square meters of floor space. Since it was founded in 1982, SAQ has grown from five employees to nearly 300.
According to Madame Tang, SAQ's focus areas for the first decade of the 21st century are:
• Focus on developing the city by science and education, and support the government's decision making
--Implement strategic research on developing Shanghai enterprise quality
--Study the theory and practice of quality competitiveness
--Explore the measurement of the macro quality level
--Conduct research on the standards system of a quality city
• Carry out multidimensional activities to support the society in cultivating a quality atmosphere
--Conduct a social survey based on the slogan "Quality and me"
--Track new social trends and evaluate the customer satisfaction index
--Publicize activities with clear themes during Quality Month
--Set up a quality clinic for public welfare services
• Actively promote quality management and help enterprises raise their quality levels
--Train what the Chinese call "100; 1,000; 10,000 quality talents"
--Promote quality system certification and improve levels of enterprise management
--Promote performance excellence management models
--Launch a mass campaign of quality management
--Effectively boost Six Sigma
• Strengthen international exchange and cooperation, and establish a platform of knowledge sharing
--Organize international symposiums on quality
--Create the Shanghai Magnolia Quality Contribution Award
--Establish an international exchange platform of quality management
--Develop cooperation with international quality organizations
• Establish a first-class quality organization
--Achieve continuous development while offering service for local government, society and enterprises
--Establish an excellent quality organization and improve quality competitiveness
These ambitious undertakings will set the future quality direction for Shanghai. Does your local quality group have the same effect on your city? You may think Japan is a fierce competitor, but it's a pussycat compared to China.
H. James Harrington is CEO of the Harrington Institute Inc. and chairman of the board of Harrington Group. He has more than 55 years of experience as a quality professional and is the author of 22 books. Visit his Web site at www.harrington-institute.com.
|
