Process/service industries techniques

Quality management is both a technical subject and a behavioral subject. It is not a bureaucratic administrative technique. The rise in popularity of ISQ 9000 has created some unhelpful messages such as the document what you do strategy. There has also been a perception in the service industries that ISQ 9000 quality systems only deal with the procedural aspects of a service and not the professional aspects. For instance in a medical practice, the ISQ 9000 quality system is often used only for processing patients... 

The reason for this was because it was felt, initially, that process-based industries would tend to have higher tool and technique usage requirements than project-based industries, and that manufacturing industries would also tend to have more need than service base industries, with combined industries somewhere in between. The rationale here was that manufacturing and process-based industries would tend to need more routinised and standardised approaches to business that would favour tool and technique usage across all four functions. On the other hand it was hypothesised that project-based and services related industries, with a more ad-hoc and less routinised approach to business, would use tools and techniques much less across all of the four functions. 

The reduction of cycle time has become an important feature of lean thinking beyond manufacturing industries where approaches other than QRM and SMED are applied. In service industries such as call centres there has extensive application of value analysis around process mapping charts. Even flow production technique (Ballard, 2001) is applied in reducing cycle time in the construction of repetitive residential homes. The technique comprises (1) overlap activities within their phase of the work, (2) reduce activity durations through... 

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