Guest post by John Hunter, author of Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability.
This webcast shows Louie Paynter’s presentation, Hallmark Building Supplies’ Approach to Applying Quality as a Business Strategy, at the 2012 Annual Deming Conference. I have written about this presentation in 2013 with a few selected clips from the presentation. Now we have added the full presentation to our YouTube channel:
Louie provides an informative discussion of the transformation of Hallmark Building Supplies as they adopted Deming’s ideas to manage their organization. It is often useful to learn about the journey of transformation of an organization to a new management system. Doing so helps illustrate that the process is a long term effort to continually improve the management system of the organization.
He discusses the importance of having a systems understanding while making changes to the management system. The performance of the system is a function of all parts of the system and the interaction of the parts. The performance of a management system is not an additive process it is a process that depends on the relative strength of each component and how they interact. The transformation process must be carefully managed with an understanding of the organization as system.
Another important concept Louie discusses is understanding variation. One way Louie mentioned of helping someone understand that variation is present in the system.
If you golf the same golf course time after time do you get the same score?
Louie discusses the importance of plotting data on a control chart (process behavior chart) in order to make decisions based on that data.
He also discusses that Hallmark Building Supplies has profit sharing for all and doesn’t do annual performance appraisal. They attempt to let the market dictate pay and take pay out of the performance discussions. To manage performance they seek to “coach while the game is going on” (and mentioned the importance of people being receptive to coaching). Cooperation between sales people has increased since they eliminated commissions.
Everyone is trained on the purpose statement, it is not just something that hangs on the wall. We use it to make decisions on a regular basis.
This presentation is a wonderful exploration of applying Deming’s ideas in a small business. I think if you take advantage of the opportunity to watch this you will learn a great deal. And if you re-watch it at different times during the transformation of the management system in your organization you will take away different thoughts that will help with your current thinking.
Related: Creating the Foundation for a Learning Organization – How to Get a New Management Strategy, Tool or Concept Adopted – The Value of the Simple Run Chart