Procedure Improvement Case Study

Background: A new spin-off from an Aerospace business with about 1200 employees needed to simplify the procedures from the old business to achieve ISO 9001 certification. The old procedures were developed independently by each functional organization with little coordination resulting in a large volume of documents with numerous conflicts. Procedures were published in paper manuals which were located in Managers offices and were rarely opened. The system had little credibility and minimal compliance.

Approach: All procedures were consolidated into a single process based system. Multifunctional teams were established to develop and approve the process flows. A dedicated procedure group then wrote procedures based on the flows and submitted them to the process teams for approval. Emphasis was placed on document simplicity and brevity. The intent was to let experience determine where more detail was needed.

Implementation: Procedures were released to an intranet site with access by all employees. All documents were html coded to keep them simple and allow the use of a readily available search tool. The search tool displayed all documents meeting the search criteria and included the paragraph containing the matched text. As a result, the desired information was frequently found with the first level search. Hyperlinks were used to avoid repeating common information shared by multiple documents. Printed copies were only allowed for short term use. Because of the risk associated with “lean” procedures, a commitment was made to employees that all procedure problems would be resolved within 5 business days.

Maintenance: A Process Owner was assigned to each document and given the responsibility to review all complaints or suggested improvements and recommend document changes to the Procedure Lead. The Procedure Lead is a single individual responsible for assuring document readability and maintenance of the web site. The Process Owner was identified on each document by name and phone number. The Procedure Lead circulated proposed changes to a multifunctional review team responsible for assuring that the Process Owner’s solution did not cause unexpected problems. The review team was given 2 work days to complete their review. A response was only required if there were concerns. If concerns were raised, the Procedure Lead facilitated an expeditious resolution. At the end of the review process, the Procedure Lead released the change. At the end of each week, the Procedure Lead published a list of all changes released that week on a web page and sent the link to all employees. All employees were responsible for awareness of all changes that impacted them.

Results: The business achieved about an 80% reduction in the volume of procedure documents and a 90% reduction in the staff required to support the system. Employees found procedures easy to access and regularly consulted them. As a result, relations with auditors and resident customer representatives dramatically improved. The Procedure Lead used web page counters to monitor usage and report the metrics to management at monthly reviews. ISO 9001 certification was achieved 9 months after the facility opened. As expected, after implementation some procedure growth was experienced to address proven needs for added process guidance.