Make 'blocking, tackling' an everyday habit
Make 'blocking, tackling' an everyday habit
What you do counts more than what you say
Visit any dental office and you'll probably see at least a few products bearing the 3M Dental Products Division (3M DPD) logo. The company has grown to be one of the larger suppliers of professional oral health supplies.
Sharing a closer look at the company in this month's Quality Talk is 3M DPD quality manager Duane Miller. 3M DPD began its quality improvement journey in 1990 and won the 1997 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.
Along the way, 3M DPD earned the ISO 9002 and 9001 certifications, the European Health Care directive certification for the CE mark, the U.S. Senate Productivity Award for California-based Manufacturers, and ISO 14001. Miller has been with 3M since the late 1960s and has headed the quality initiative at 3M DPD since 1986.
Q. As a member of the health care community, your company is no stranger to the market demands of managed care. Yet, 3M DPD gets outstanding satisfaction ratings from your key constituencies: your distributors, the dentists who use your products, and your employees. Many health care providers are struggling with employee and customer satisfaction issues now. What were the hard lessons your company learned about satisfying customers and employees?
A. I don't know that we had any "hard lessons" that were big eurekas to us. When it comes to satisfaction, whether you're looking at employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, or satisfaction with your other stakeholders, I think the real key is what we call the "blocking and tackling." It's doing the basic things very well because that's how you win with these people.
The other aspect for a management or leadership team is your customers' or employees' interest in what you do instead of what you say. We truly try to focus on that. We do not try to delegate to someone else our responsibility. When we do make decisions as a leadership team, we constantly ask, "What would our customer expect?" or "What would our employees expect?" and "How could we make that visible?"
It's tough work, and you need to do it day in and day out. It's not one of these things that you do for a month or two and then go away and forget it. It's blocking and tackling everyday.
Q. What are the basic elements of "blocking and tackling" with employees?
A. Our leadership team is big on walking around. For example, our business has about 700 employees and, I would say, literally every employee knows our executive managers on a first-name basis. We're pretty proud of that because we make a very concerted effort to make sure we are available to people and not only are we available, but we go out and seek people's input.
For instance, our CEO and the other executive managers go out and talk with the people who are meeting the customers first hand. They sit in and listen to the customers calling in on our hotline. Our CEO is out with the production people on the line, visiting and asking them what they're doing - very visible.
Q. What are your basics in terms of customer satisfaction?
A. First, lots of visibility. We attend focus panels where customers come in and look at the products and product ideas. We go to lots of trade shows. We're active in university programs where we're seeking input.
We do a lot of field evaluations of products and ideas. We consult with a "key influencer" group who are the movers and shakers in the dental industry.
We have tremendous opportunities to listen to the customer.
Q. Your company's steering committee sponsors 43 ongoing and short-term teams that manage new product introduction, solve problems, and manage and improve business processes. How important are cross-functional teams to the improvement process?
A. Teams are absolutely critical. It's really how we conduct our business and get things done. Although we are aligned functionally in terms of reporting, the major structure in terms of running our business is really in teams.
The 43 teams you mentioned are actually chartered by our executive committee. Those are primarily the product teams and business process teams that we want to make visible at a very high level.
We train teams through internal and external groups. One external group we worked with from Washington, DC, is called Training Works. Plus, we have internal training for everything from how to work as a team and how to handle conflict to developing mission statements and giving feedback.
For us, teams have become such a cultural thing that people really like to be on them. They see it as another way to gain recognition. By definition in our culture, teams have a sunset: A mission, a beginning and an end.
Q. 3M DPD's business Performance Man-agement Matrix provides a "systematic and comprehensive tool for aligning key business drivers and goals down through and across all business and functional units and tracks progress against division, functional unit, and team goals."
Health care providers, especially hospital systems, are generally well behind in tracking operational and clinical data. They lack critical information technology and talent. As an officer in a company that puts a premium on the ability to track and analyze your data, how critical has this ability been toward your achieving quality results in your processes?
A. It's been absolutely critical. We like to say that if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. Sure, sometimes it's difficult to measure some things like innovation. We actually have some measurements that we look at in terms of innovation. What we look at with this Business Performance Management Matrix is not only results, but actions that lead to results. That's where our real focus is, on doing the things that are going to get the results.
Here's a simple illustration in the area of sales performance: We do not just measure whether the sales people are meeting their forecasts because that's a result. What we want is to measure the things that get the result. So we'll measure time in front of the customer, or attendance at regional meetings and study clubs, or participation in focus groups.
We try to find the antecedents or the things that can be done to influence the results. That's the one thing we feel is really important in being able to manage by data.
Q. Could one weigh too heavily on the side of measuring the antecedents and spin wheels without actually getting results?
A. I suppose, but usually we split the points about 60% on the side of the actions and 40% on the results. We're really trying to get people to focus on doing the right things at the right time. If we're not getting the results, then that tells us we're not working on the right things. That brings people back to saying, for example, "OK, if I'm not getting the result, then maybe the time in front of the customers or at these focus panels isn't what's really delivering." So we should look at what is delivering. So we go back to that individual team with their performance matrix and ask them what they think they should be doing in order to achieve the kind of results we want.
It's a very iterative process. We do not lock these in and say, for example, over a year's time you must continue to work these antecedents if they're not getting the results.
Q. Does your company regularly benchmark outside your industry? If so, could you give a couple of examples of the types of companies you have benchmarked and the quality lessons your teams learned there?
A. We do some of that, and only when we need to do it. In the classic sense, we don't do a lot of benchmarking. Instead, we do a lot of comparisons. We'll see how we compare in a particular business process with companies we know have good processes. Then, if it's something we feel we need to get a lot better at, we'll actually go out and do classic benchmarking where we ask a company if we can come and discuss some of the things they're doing. Obviously, part of that is we must share what we're doing so it's a cooperative thing.
Classic benchmarking
We've done classic benchmarking in a couple of cases. One that comes to mind is in our manufacturing plant safety. Although we had a very good safety record compared to most of the business units within 3M, we really felt it was an area where we needed to be the best.
So the company that is well known for safety is DuPont in the chemical processing area, which is kind of like what we do. So we benchmarked their plant in Texas. And they came to us for an exchange of ideas they could implement at their plant. That was two or three years ago. Today, we are actually more safe than they are according to their records. That was based simply on using what they taught us.
Q. In the last 10 years, 3M Dental Products has doubled its sales without increasing staff. What part has your emphasis on employee training played in this achievement? Is increasing sales a primary theme in 3MDPD's training or are better sales an outgrowth of more knowledgeable employees?
A. Yes to both. But our growth is by design, don't let anybody fool you! We intended to grow. In fact, one of the things we're pretty proud about is that when new employees come to our unit either from within 3M or from outside, we bring them in and do some quality training. They get to meet all the executive committee individually for about an hour at a time.
They get to discuss all the functional responsibilities that particular committee member has. At the time they meet the general manager, he gives them a membership card into the division. On that card it has our vision on one side and on the other side are our values as a company.
Our vision talks about becoming "THE supplier of choice to global dental professional markets, providing world-class quality in innovative products." In order to do that, we must grow our business, and we have very specific growth objectives each year.
At least twice each year our executive committee will review where we are in the strategic plan objectives for our growth and other significant measurements.
Make expectations known
We share that with all the employees so they know exactly what we're after and what our expectation is. Then that's downloaded throughout the whole organization right into each individual's employee contribution and development plan.
Then the training goes hand in hand with that. The development program for our salaried employees is individual. So you would sit down with your supervisor and develop your own individual plan.
On a yearly basis, it could be anything from taking some college credit courses to gaining some kind of skill like public speaking or some kind of accounting or legal training. It's usually spelled out whether it will be through a community college class or a variety of other means.
For larger groups such as sales and manufacturing plant people who have similar job responsibilities, we have training coordinators. For example, our manufacturing facility in Burbank, CA, is highly diverse.
We have 60% or 70% minorities. We do a lot of training in basic skills from English as a second language to basic math and engineering skills. Those are usually in conjunction with community colleges or through outside trainers.
Q. Your company was able to cut your cycle time for new product development from three years in 1984 to 10 months a decade later. Health care providers are being forced into new areas of business (primarily from inpatient to outpatient) by the need to shift costs from the more expensive acute care environment to the less expensive outpatient and home environments. What advice do you have for hospital system managers trying to quickly develop new product lines?
A. I'm a little reluctant to give advice, but I could give a few things I would do on any general business process. First, I would do a business process map on a particular activity in health care. It could be something like the customer billing and collecting process, or extended care vs. acute care.
I would break it down to all the processes involved like advertising, registration, or plant facility management. I'd try to understand a particular process and map with a business process map. Once I did that, then I would get the people involved together to do the what if? What if we change some of these things, how would that affect the outcome? That would be one place to look at reducing the time of your processes.
You may even want to go back further and spend some time with your customer. There are a variety of ways you can do this so you can really understand not only the customer needs, but you really get inside the customer's head. Quite often, customers cannot fully articulate what their needs and wants are. You have to understand and live a little bit with them so you can really understand what they're faced with. Then you can provide a differentiating service or product.
Direct observation fuels development
One of the things that drove down our product development time was our people spent a lot more time with dentists. Not just asking what they want, but observing what they do and living with them for a while. That way our people could see what services and technology apply to a particular need that customers may not even recognize. An outsider can see those things. That could be something like how many times they had to redo an impression [of a tooth] to get a good impression.
Then we could spot an opportunity - boy, instead of a 15-minute procedure, if we could make that a 5-minute procedure with some technology or product, we will have developed a whole new opportunity!
[For more on 3M DPD's quality programs contact:
· Duane Miller, 3M Dental Products Division, 3M Center, Building 275-2E-03, St. Paul, MN 55144. Telephone: (612) 733-7767. World Wide Web: http://www.mmm.com/dental/baldrige.]
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