SLAAQP seminar on conducting Quality Week/month
In preparation for the Inter national Quality Month in November and t he I nternational Standards Day in October, the Sri Lanka Association for the Advancement of Quality and Productivity (SLAAQP) has organised an afternoon seminar on Tuesday, August 27, 2013 to educate Sri Lankan businesses on how to formulate and implement activities for a ‘Quality Week’ or a ‘Quality Month’.
The programme would be as follows: 1. Introduction to the Quality Week/Quality Month concept and what happens in the rest of the world by Sunil G. Wijesinha, 2. The Quality Week at DSI Sportswear Plant, Kalutara by Deputy General Manager Lakmal Dharmaratne, 3. The Quality Week at Dankotuwa Porcelain PLC by GM Technical Dr. U. Farook, 4. The Quality Week at the Asiri Group of Hospitals by Head of HR Hasanthi De Saram, 5. Discussion.
Further i nformation could be had from Indrani De Silva, SLAAQP, c/o The National Chamber of Commerce of Sri Lanka, Tel; 011 4741788, email: slaaqp@nationalcahmber. lk. Accommodation is limited and will be on a firstcome-first-served basis and will close on Monday, August 26 at 12:00 noon.
With Sri Lanka facing a decline in exports as a result of losing competitiveness to countries with cheaper labour and other inputs, it becomes imperative that Sri Lanka focuses on higher level products which compete on quality. Therefore, it is time that a similar programme is conducted countrywide in Sri Lanka. Many years ago the Sri Lanka Standards Institution (SLSI) organised a Quality Week to coincide with the International Standards Day and this programmes still continues every year with many manufacturing organisations conducting Quality Week activities but it is not spreading widely enough. The SLAAQP receives many requests for judges for Quality Circle competitions, poster competitions, etc. conducted by companies during this week but SLAAQP has noticed that it is the same companies that do it every year.
The Quality Month concept originated in Japan in the 1960s, when the whole country was mobilised to conduct activities to improve the quality of products, processes and services, while educating the workforce about quality and methods of improving quality.
This was the time that Japan became very aggressive in developing quality techniques and improving quality, which quickly brought results when the world noticed that Japan had shed its ‘cheap and shoddy’ quality image to ‘exceptional and surprising quality’. Japan became famous not only for quality and exceptional customer orientation but also for the many process improvement techniques wellknown even today such as the PDCA cycle, the Ishikawa (fish bone) diagram, Quality Circles, Kaizen, Company Wide Quality Control (TQM later), Poka Yoke, Hoshin Kanri, 5S, etc. By the 1990s Japanese Management techniques were at its peak. Many teams from other countries were visiting Japan to learn how they became such a high quality manufacturer almost overnight.