Professional Green Qualitists

Job Design

SIPOC

Over the past three decades, Professional Qualitists have solved chronic quality problems through the lens of SIPOC – Supplier/ Input/ Process/ Output/ Customer. In so doing, they have delivered attractive bottom-line results, across industries.

The SIPOC approach was pioneered by Motorola in the mid-1980s and popularized by GE thereafter. This top-down approach helped Motorola to come out of the Red; and GE to evolve into a global Benchmark for Quality Practices.

Industrial System and Nature

Over the same three decades, the global industrial system (what we make, buy, and use) has grown multi-fold, with cross-country inter-dependencies. The focus was, and has been, largely on automobiles, entertainment electronics, roads, bridges, buildings, and power plants. This industrial system sits within the larger complex (yet simple) system(s) of nature.

The larger natural world includes living-regenerative resources, such as forests, croplands, and fisheries. There are other resources that, from a human time perspective, do not regenerate, such as oils and minerals.

The regenerative resources can sustain human activities indefinitely, so long as we do not harvest them more rapidly than they replenish themselves. A recommended Green Quality Practice.

The non-regenerative resources can only be depleted. This is why mining, oil production, and other similar industries are called extractive industries, since they cannot be replenished and start to run out. These are avoidable Brown Quality Practices.

Waste

We all know, that the industrial system generates waste from extracting and harvesting resources, and from how we produce, use, and eventually discard goods. This waste damages the ability of nature to replenish resources.

The industrial system also sits within a larger social system of communities, families, schools and cultures. Just as overproduction and waste damage natural systems, they also cause anxiety, inequity, and stresses in our societies.

We need Professional Green Qualitists who deliver results that benefit nature and society. It is not enough to measure the Cost Of Poor Quality (COPQ) in a production unit.  

Professional Green Qualitists must expand their turf. They should get engaged in the chain of SIPOCs of:

• Extracting and Harvesting Natural Resources
• Goods in Production
• Goods in Use.

Identifying the waste in the chain of SIPOCs,  and solving the related chronic-waste problems, would demonstrate respect for nature and society. And more significantly, our children. Professional Green Qualitists are here to stay.