learning about the correct implementation of the ISO 9001:2000 quality ..... PowerPoint presentations that may help to explain the concept of quality to the.
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CASE STUDY
Gironacel: a virtual learning experience for improving quality Martı´ Casadesu´s, Marta Albertı´ and Empar Mendez Departament d’Organitzacio´, Gestio´ Empresarial i Desenvolupament de Producte, Universitat de Girona, Girona, Spain Abstract Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present the Gironacelw project. The aim of this tool is to make it easier for companies to implement ISO 9001:2000 standard in a very practical and non-interruptive way. Design/methodology/approach – By means of creating a fictitious virtual company, called Gironacel, to be used as an example, it aims to provide companies using the tool with all kinds of information concerning the challenges that the Gironacel company faces and all the difficulties and consequences that come with them. Findings – The paper give companies a clear and highly practical reference regarding the implications of any new project, such as, for example, implementing a quality management system, which is the first of the objectives chosen for the virtual company and the challenge that is dealt with in this paper. Originality/value – This paper explains how this new tool was designed and implemented, along with the results expected of it. Keywords Quality management, ISO 9000 series, Distance learning, Spain Paper type Case study
The TQM Magazine Vol. 17 No. 6, 2005 pp. 546-557 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0954-478X DOI 10.1108/09544780510627642
1. Introduction CIDEM (Centre d’Innovacio´ i Desenvolupament Empresarial – Centre for Innovation and Business Development; www.cidem.com) is run by the Generalitat – the autonomous government of Catalonia, which is the most industrialised region in Spain. The aim of this government body is to assist and provide incentives for innovation and development in Catalan companies. The Catalan Centre for Quality (CCQ), an organisation that focuses on improving quality management in Catalan companies, is directly dependent on CIDEM. In early 2003, the CCQ observed that Catalan companies were taking out ISO 9000 certification at a steady pace but that some active incentive was needed, especially now that the new version of this standard had come into effect (Casadesu´s and Albertı´, 2003). They decided to create a tool to help companies who had not yet got involved in implementing the requirements of the standard. The specific aim was to create a tool that collected all the information that they had gathered together in the previous years (CIDEM, 2001), but at the same time, broaden it and adapt it to much more practical aspects that would make it more accessible and useful to the companies using it. From this initial idea, and with the collaboration of the University of Girona, a few months later the Gironacelw project began: a fictitious virtual company which gradually showed, through its own experiences, how it had implemented the ISO 9001:2000 quality management standard, revealing the successes and the errors, while
at the same time offering the users all kinds of information (links, topics of interest, etc.) and tools (presentations, check lists, examples of procedures, etc.) to help make implementation easier. The aim of this fictitious company was not only to serve as an example to users learning about the correct implementation of the ISO 9001:2000 quality management standard, but to go beyond that, meeting all the challenges they came up against, one after the other: innovation management, internationalisation, etc. Gironacel is without doubt a new tool in the field of training and, in an area such as quality management, which is often lacking in genuinely practical training tools, it is hoped that some very good results will be produced. In this paper, we focus on the range and the limitations of this project, in the hope of making its applications better known and to provide new ideas for future similar applications. 2. Training in quality management Since 1985, when the ISO 9000 quality assurance standard became popular throughout the world, many companies have successfully implemented it; in fact, 561,747 companies had obtained certification by December 2002 (ISO, 2003). Without doubt, one of the biggest contributions of this standard has been not just to enable companies to reach a particular minimum level of quality, but, in addition, it has become an important, possibly the most important, stimulus for companies to take on board the concept of quality and, more specifically, that of continuous improvement. It is through the implementation of ISO 9000 that companies have come to understand what lies behind terms such as, “managing quality” and what “improving quality” really implies. Aspects such as “total quality management”, “customer satisfaction”, “quality assurances”, etc. have gone from little known concepts to being common currency in the today’s business world. Traditionally, official implementation of ISO 9000 in companies has been preceded by an important phase of training, the aim being to introduce a “culture of quality” into the company. Such training has taken place in a high percentage of the companies involved, since it is a key factor in the process, as observed in various investigations (Vloeberghs and Bellens, 1996; Casadesu´s and Gime´nez, 2000; Soha and Terziovski, 2000); this training is provided on the whole by specialist consultants. In fact, some empirical studies indicate that nearly 80 per cent of implementations have involved external consultants (Marimon et al., 2002). Without doubt, the field of quality management is no different from other areas of business where there are large investments in training, but it is one of the areas that has had the most influence in recent years. Having said that, it is no less certain that implementation of these new systems of quality assurance began in the bigger companies (Casadesu´s and Gime´nez, 2000), and that little by little it spread to smaller companies, on their own initiative or because of the market pressure they were subjected to. In this way, it can be taken as read that training in quality management has followed a parallel development; for example, if we look at the empirical work of Patel (1994), we find that more than 80 per cent of big companies had trained their employees in order to improve certain aspects of quality management, while the figure for small and medium-sized companies did not reach 40 per cent. This means that there are many small and medium-sized companies that are still in the process of finding their way in terms of certification and, in fact,
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optimistic forecasts indicate that this market is still far from being saturated (Saraiva and Duarte, 2003). Evidently, these companies have, on the whole, less financial capacity than the larger companies to meet the requirements for certification and, quite possibly, less personnel to assign to such tasks which means it is difficult for them to get the resources and time needed for implementation. It is these kinds of companies that we feel the need to use some kind of tool that will improve their capacity to train their staff and, in this way, improve their competitiveness. What new kinds of tools will make it easier to get involved and that are within reach of all kinds of companies? Without doubt, new technologies – which, fortunately, are less and less “new” for everyone – offer unbeatable opportunities for designing tools that can be put to work in this area, accessible to all kinds of companies, easily updated in real time and with no restrictions in terms of the type of company using them. Previous projects have shown that for getting to the largest number of people possible, the internet has become, without question, the way forward. In recent years, many training projects have appeared on the internet, although many of them do not really benefit from the possibilities for dynamic work the net offers and, instead, end up being simple tutorials or online books (Kilby, 2001). Gregory (2003) has already shown us that training on the internet improves greatly when it includes some kind of real-time interaction, whether with other students or with instructors, so the possibility of including such interaction with other agents in this kind of training must be encouraged, while avoiding the design of platforms that are too static. Analysing previous experiences, such as, for example, those of the various distance training courses, looking at successes and failures, for example, in studies by Van Brackel (1999) and Walker (1999) is the only way to begin the project since no references sufficiently similar to it were found. 3. Objective of the Gironacel project In recent years, CIDEM has concentrated its activities in four main areas: improving quality, increasing internationalisation, increasing digitalisation and increasing innovation in Catalan companies. To achieve these goals, CIDEM has carried out and continues to carry out all kinds of training activities (courses, congresses, etc.), promotional awards (awards for innovation, quality, etc.), publishing information (guides to innovation, books, etc.) and so on. CIDEM now has two very important goals in the coming years. First of all, they want to ensure that the tools and procedures that the large companies have taken on board so well, can be more easily transferred to much smaller companies which, in fact, make up the majority of companies in Catalan industry. Secondly, CIDEM plans to transfer knowledge which is more and more practical, with less theoretical content, in a way that is taken in much more rapidly by companies. In fact, this is a goal that has been pursued by CIDEM through the so-called “improvement tools” (CIDEM, 2001) which showed different practical applications of tools such as brainstorming and poka-yoke, etc. In this setting, the Gironacel project began. The aim was to take advantage of the new technologies to provide complete practical knowledge (which, in part, CIDEM already has in different formats) for all Catalan companies, especially small and medium-sized companies. In fact, the final goal of the Gironacel project is to produce a tool that will enable Catalan companies to improve their competitiveness by means of
dynamic training in new business challenges beginning from real experiences in which successes and failures can be studied, all within a minimally theoretical framework. It is a project promoted and financed by CIDEM and developed by GREPP (Grup de Recerca en Enginyeria de Producte, Processos i Produccio´ – Product, Processes and Production Engineering Research Group) at the University of Girona. As well as achieving the goals outlined above, the project has to have certain specific features. Firstly, it has to be valid for all kinds of companies, without differentiating between service and production companies. Secondly, it has to improve knowledge transfer from those controlling the company to the rest of the employees – an aspect which is often forgotten in many training activities. For example, in the case of ISO 9000:1994, it was relatively easy to get across the objective of improving quality to staff in high and intermediate positions in the companies’ chain of command, by means of courses and congresses which they attended. But how is this knowledge to be transferred to the rest of the workers? Or at least, how can we ensure that the intermediates in the chain of command transmit this knowledge to their subordinates? This is yet another important challenge that this project must deal with. Finally, this project was to be set up by the 1st of January 2004. Accordingly, the range of challenges in which companies may have an interest had to be limited. For this reason, CIDEM decided to focus the tool on improving quality management and, specifically, the implementation of the ISO 9001:2000 standard. In this way, the aim is to serve all those companies that are either implementing this quality system for the first time, or else are in the process of transformation from the previous ISO 9001:1994. In any case, any training that Gironacel helps to achieve must be complete and must fit not only within the standard’s own scope of quality assurance, but also within the scope of quality management, whether the company that uses the tool is in the production or service sector, and within all the areas defined by Lewis (1992) as follows: . Training to gain quality awareness: This is training aimed at defining quality, TQM, customer satisfaction, etc. . Training to support quality improvement skills: This is training in communication skills, leadership, team working, etc. . Training to acquire quality improvement skills: This is directed towards teaching employees and managers the tools and techniques of defining, documenting and improving processes, and reaching long-term quality goals. Gironacel must be designed to respond to these objectives and, at the same time, be able to go beyond them in the near future, within the same area of quality management (EFQM model, ISO 9004:2000, etc.) or within other areas of business challenges (internationalisation, digitalisation, corporate social responsibility, etc.). 4. Application: the virtual company: Gironacel In developing this project, a fictitious company called Gironacel was devised, existing only in the virtual world. It is a company with two lines of business: it makes paragliders and other articles related to paragliding and, at the same time, organises short courses for people who want to learn how to use them.
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Although it is a virtual company, Gironacel sets itself various objectives and has to face certain problems in the same way that real companies do. In addition, it is a “live” company, undergoing constant development affected by daily reality that leads it often to rethink established objectives, just as is the case in real companies. The company dynamics are reflected in the company’s own news, which appears periodically, the magazine published by the company itself, changes in objectives, the emergence of new products, staff changes, etc. that is to say, all events, planned or otherwise, that contribute to the development of the company. In the coming years, Gironacel will take on different challenges, which will be recorded in its strategic plan. Some of these challenges involve improvement to the quality management system, getting into a cycle of continuous improvement, getting involved in the process of environmental improvement and establishing a system for innovation management. As a first step in the development of this strategic plan, and within the limits set down at the beginning of this project, Gironacel will propose improving its quality management system by means of the implementation of the ISO 9001:2000 quality assurance standard. The structural aspects and practical implementation which will help users to analyse and learn from the experience of Gironacel are described in the following sections. 4.1 Basic structure A web site is the platform used by Gironacel to get across the teaching content, by means of the actions taken by the company itself in order to meet the goals that were set. Figure 1 shows the structure of the web site. From the home page, the user can access a wide range of content which has two different functions: on the one hand,
Figure 1. Structure of the web site of the Gironacelw project
the user can consult any information directly related to the company such as, for example, the internal organisation or the products it offers; on the other hand, the user can find information relating to the development of the company, such as company news or, above all, the strategic plan – the scenario in which the events of most interest to the user are played out. Hence, in this strategic plan, the company proposes certain goals; specifically, improvement in quality, innovation and internationalisation, as well as technological improvements. In this way, for any objective the company proposes, the procedure it follows is divided into phases, each of which contains a statement of the company objectives, along with any qualms the company may have and the tools that will be used to deal with them. In the specific case of the implementation of ISO 9001:2000, the project is divided into six phases, each one representing a state in which the company finds itself before gaining the ISO 9000 certificate. The name of each phase is a question that Gironacel is asking itself at a given moment during implementation and, at the same time showing the commonest positions a company may find itself in during the process of implementing this standard. The six phases are as follows: (1) Do we also have to get certification? This is the early phase, in which the manager of the company does not yet know much about quality management systems but has heard about them and thinks that they may be useful to his/her company. It is a time for collecting information and learning about the basic concepts involving the culture of quality. (2) Where do we begin? In this second phase, the manager has taken the decision to get involved in a quality system and is carrying out a series of actions aimed at starting the process: he/she draws up a plan, puts somebody in charge of quality and informs the rest of the employees about quality management systems. (3) Do we begin with the easiest procedures? Once the plan is established, it is time to draw up the documentation. A good tactic consists of beginning with the most basic procedures, in order to get to know how to deal with them, before taking on more complex procedures. (4) Why not take advantage of what we are doing to improve further? As the procedures are being put into practice, the people involved begin to realise the potential usefulness of what they are doing and the importance it may have in improving various company-related aspects. (5) The ISO inspectors are coming to audit us. Obtaining the certificate is the culmination of the work done and recognition of the effort involved, but the audit will bring with it a series of challenges and problems that will become known during this phase. (6) All done. Now what do we do? When the quality certificate has been awarded, many possibilities open up for companies that want to get into a process of continuous improvement. In this phase, information is sought on models of excellence, awards for quality, integrated management systems and other aspects of special relevance to the company.
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To emphasise the fact that Gironacel is a “live” company, the information relevant to the implementation of ISO 9000 is not presented all at once. Instead, the various phases will appear on the web according to a pre-established calendar, simulating the time intervals that the company would need to develop from one phase to the next. During each phase, the user will have at his/her disposal all the information and tools that the company has used to carry out the project, ranging from published articles that the people in charge of quality have read in order to understand particular topics, to practical examples such as procedural manuals that Gironacel has drawn up, or PowerPoint presentations that may help to explain the concept of quality to the workers. To give an example of this, we have drawn up a table (Table I) that shows the information that the user will find during the second phase. 4.2 Practical implementation The homepage of the Gironacel web site (Figure 2), which can be accessed via www. gironacel.com[1], was designed to be like that of any other conventional company: there is information on the organisation and the products and services on offer; there is the possibility of contacting the company via e-mail, as well as a news section, which will develop at the same rate as the process itself and, finally, a link for each of the goals proposed for the company (quality, innovation, better technology and digitalisation). From this main page and for each goal, the different phases can be accessed. In the specific case of improving the quality management system, the initial page corresponding to the first phase is shown in Figure 3. We shall use this phase as an example in this paper; the other phases have a very similar structure. In the central area of the page (Figure 3), there is an explanation of the action taken by company employees (in this case, this only involves the manager) in relation to the
Information
Type of information
What is the ISO 9001:2000 standard?
Theoretical explanation with practical examples (manuals about quality, procedures, working instructions, etc.) Certification plan with human and economic resources Information and links
Planning certification according to the ISO 9001:2000 standard Grants, subventions and training courses in quality management Quality consultants Explaining the process of certification
Table I. Information available to users during phase 2 of the Gironacelw project
Addresses of interest Tools for getting the workforce involved in the process Concepts related to quality management Evaluation of the degree of quality in the company Costs and implementation time
Theoretical explanation of their role and links to consultants operating in Catalonia Theoretical explanation and links to the organisations involved Links PowerPoint presentations, posters and examples Dictionary/search tool Interactive check-list FAQs and databases based on empirical studies by CIDEM and others
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Figure 2. Principal web page of the Gironacelw company
Figure 3. Main page of the first phase: “Do we also have to get certification?”
implementation of the system, with links to the different tools used: articles, web pages, PowerPoint presentations, studies, frequently-asked questions and so on. On the left-hand side of the page, there are more links to other important information: Personnel involved, with an explanation of the various people involved and the tasks
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Figure 4. Example of the information available in the second phase. Presentations for motivating the workforce
they carry out; Documentation, where documents drawn up by the company can be found (at this stage, the only document that appears is the planning document for certification); and Organisational chart, which describes the internal structure of the company. Although this chart is not modified during the implementation process, it is always present in the different web pages so that, when the user consults documents, such as the procedural manual, he/she has the structure of the organisation at hand – making it easier to understand. In a side frame, there are icons that link to FAQs, Tools, Links, Items of interest and a Dictionary. This structure is maintained through all the phases, although the content will increase in size as the process of certification develops. These links take the user to another window, as shown in Figure 4, in order to make navigation easier. In the case of the first phase, the information to be found in each one of these links is as follows: . FAQs. These are very general questions, since they simulate the questions that arise in a company at the initial stages of the process. For example, what does certification cost? How long does it take to obtain it? How can we get financial aid? . Tools. Here the user will find PowerPoint presentations which use graphs and diagrams to explain, in a very practical way, topics such as the concept of quality and the ISO 9000 standards. The aim of these presentations is to facilitate the transfer of this knowledge to the different groups of workers within the company. . Links. These links take the user to institutions involved in quality management, such as, for example, the International Standardisation Organisation or the European Organisation for Quality.
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Items of interest. In this first phase, the items found here, although basic, are necessary for a good understanding of the culture of quality. Examples include Introduction to the ISO 9000:2000 standard and Reasons for acquiring certification according to the ISO 9001 standard. Apart from these themes dealing with theory, there are also articles with the opinions of managers of different Catalan companies describing their own experiences in the first phases of implementing a quality system. Dictionary. Here the user will find definitions of the main concepts related to the culture of quality.
Once the users have consulted the information related to one phase, they can then move directly onto the next, or else whichever phase interests them, because in the upper toolbar there is a menu for navigating through the different phases. The menu also shows very clearly in which phase the users are at any time. In order to make navigation as user-friendly as possible, each phase has the same structure, so the user can learn quickly and easily how the site is organised and how to use it. 5. Conclusions Without doubt, training by means of new technologies is, fortunately, more and more common, with better and better results; however, what is not so common is the way it has been used in this project. The Gironacel project centres on training which is 100 per cent practical, using a fictitious company which serves as a model and which shows the successes, failures and the tools utilised to develop a particular project in an interactive way and which is in constant evolution. In the limited part of the project presented in this paper, the objective of the Gironacel company is the implementation of the ISO 9001:2000 quality assurance standard and the different phases the company goes through show us the different positions that companies using the tool may find themselves in. The most important thing about the virtual company is that the users have at their disposal, throughout each phase, not only the knowledge necessary to implement the requirements of the standard, for example, via the Items of interest, but they also have other tools which go well beyond what they would find in a theory session on the subject, such as, for example, PowerPoint presentations for involving the workforce, posters, FAQs, the working procedures of the company itself, quality manuals, check-lists, etc. Such a close-up look at the process has never been available before, since previous attempts in many areas of business training have delved deeply into theoretical aspects, but have rarely come close to seeing how these theories are implemented in reality, which is what this project offers. Implementing quality assurance systems according to the ISO 9000:2000 standard is a good example of this and, specifically, drawing up procedures according to the requirements of this standard. This task is extremely problematic when you remember all the different methods and criteria in the literature that have to be taken into account when drawing up procedures and the difficulty of writing such a thing in reality if you have never seen an example of one before.
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Clearly, projects such as Gironacel will not be a substitute for traditional means of training, whether it be in university classrooms or in company conference rooms, but it can be a really helpful tool in such training, especially in smaller companies with fewer resources and less time to spend on training which, on the other hand, tend to have a technological capacity to match the bigger companies. It is true that this kind of information has many advantages over more conventional training: it can be delivered to a much higher number of users, it has a dynamic character, the information can be updated immediately, etc. but it is also true that, despite the existence of forums, chats and other tools, interaction is somewhat more difficult than it is in a traditional training session. However, if tools such as these are complemented correctly, then they open up a new range of possibilities in training. Although this project can currently only show us how, and with what tools, it has improved quality management in the Gironacel Company, the same working scheme is in the process of being designed to face new challenges in the future, with particular emphasis on innovation management. Note 1. At this time, the Gironacel web site, along with all the information derived from it, is written in Catalan, the official language of Catalonia, since this is the language in which the system has been implemented. The web site will shortly be available in English. References Casadesu´s, M. and Albertı´, M. (2003), “La innovacio´ i la gestio´ de la qualitat a les empreses de Catalunya”, Col · leccio´ Estudis, Generalitat de Catalunya, CIDEM, Barcelona. Casadesu´s, M. and Gime´nez, G. (2000), “The benefits of the implementation of the ISO 9000 standard: empirical research in 288 Spanish companies”, The TQM Magazine, Vol. 12 No. 6, pp. 432-41. CIDEM (2001), Eines de millora, Departament d’Indu´stria, Comerc¸ i Turisme, Generalitat de Catalunya, Barcelona. Gregory, V.L. (2003), “Student perception of the effectiveness of Web-based distance education”, New Library World, Vol. 104 No. 1193, pp. 426-31. ISO (2003), “The ISO survey of ISO 9000 and ISO 14001 certificates”, International Standarization Organization, available at: www.iso.org Kilby, T. (2001), “The direction of web-based training: a practitioner’s view”, The Learning Organization, Vol. 8 No. 5, pp. 194-9. Lewis, K. (1992), “TQM training”, TQM Practitioner Series, Technical Communications Publishing, Hertford. Marimon, F., Casadesu´s, M. and Heras, I. (2002), “Do quality consultants offer a quality service?”, Total Quality Management, Vol. 13 No. 6, pp. 797-811. Patel, A. (1994), “Assessing total quality training in Wales”, Training for Quality, Vol. 2 No. 2, pp. 13-21. Saraiva, P.B. and Duarte, B. (2003), “ISO 9000: some statistical results for a worldwide phenomenon”, TQM & Business Excellence, Vol. 14 No. 10, pp. 1169-78. Soha, A.S. and Terziovski, M. (2000), “TQM in Australian manufacturing: factors critical to success”, International Journal of Quality &Reliability Management, Vol. 17 No. 2, pp. 158-67.
Van Brackel, P. (1999), “Teaching information management via a web based course”, The Electronic Library, Vol. 17 No. 6, pp. 389-94. Vloeberghs, D. and Bellens, J. (1996), “Implementing the ISO 9000 standards”, Quality Progress, Vol. 29 No. 6, pp. 43-8. Walker, D.H.T. (1999), “Quality – using the world wide web for developing project management research case studies”, Facilities, Vol. 17 Nos 5/6, pp. 195-200.
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