Managing for Quality and Performance Excellence 10th Edition by James Evans ,William Lindsay

Exercise 1

Corning Incorporated was founded in 1851. One of the first companies in the United States to institutionalize research and development as a key business strategy, Corning is known for innovations in the development of glass products and glass- and ceramics-based applications. These include Gorilla ® Glass, a tough and damage-resistant application for touch screens on smartphones, tablets, slates, notebooks, and televisions, and telecommunications products such as optical fiber and cable connections systems that link people and businesses worldwide.
James (Jamie) R. Houghton, a descendant of Coming's founding family, served his first term as CEO from 1983 to 1996. During this time, he introduced the concept of total quality management to the company. Figure 14.3 provides a summary view of this quality journey that continues today.
In the early 1980s, Corning joined AT T, Cargill, Ford, Milliken, Motorola, Xerox, and other pioneering businesses in the pursuit of quality methodology to increase value. While the methods and concepts varied from one organization to another, a few recurring concepts emerged:
• Attack on all fronts; everyone needs to be engaged. Quality has to be a total effort.
• Develop small teams that attack projects by fixing processes across company operations.
• Tools of quality-such as Pareto analysis, fishbone diagrams, and statistical control charts-are taught, learned, and used by many teams.
• Among early adopters, the "attack on a broad front" strategy, which is implicit in the phrase total quality, requires the complete support of the CEO.
FIGURE 14.3 Coming's Heritage of Quality

Source: Adapted from Mary Beth Buckman and James Buckman, "The Corning Journey to Performance Excellence: Innovation Spanning Three Centuries," ASQ Next Generation Quality Leadership case study, July 2013. http://asq.org/knowledge-center/case-studies-corning.html.
During the early to mid-1980s, Corning made enormous strides in quality and company performance. The company achieved a milestone in 1995 when its telecommunications products division received the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. From the late 1990s through the early part of the twenty-first century, Corning went through a boom period, exceeding market expectations while balancing opportunities and challenges. For instance, the tech bubble of the time contributed to an upward swing for several product lines, particularly fiber optics. However, that opportunity then turned into a challenge when the fiber optics market became saturated. Additionally, Coming's quality advantage had become outdated, no longer providing the competitive edge of cost and speed necessary to continue prospering from innovations alone. These issues created some difficulties for Corning in terms of competitiveness, sales opportunities, and cash flow, so the Corning Board of Directors asked Houghton to return as CEO in 2002.
Houghton felt it necessary to re-examine the fundamentals of Corning: its values, strategy, culture, and leadership. He asked Corning executives to analyze the company's expressed values and compare them to the current reality of practices, operations, and culture. At least one of the values-quality-was no longer a top priority. As evidence of its diminishing role, the quality office reported to a low level in the company hierarchy as the legendary quality advantage dissipated. Houghton searched for a new quality leader who would report frequently and personally to him, sending a clear message about the primacy of quality renewal.
Coming's new performance excellence initiative was based on the following guidelines:
• Concentrate on cost advantage.
• Preserve and enhance the historic culture of innovation that had been the guiding light of everything the company accomplished.
• Ensure that the continuous improvement system was the best in its class. Corning would use common quality tools, such as Six Sigma, lean, and kaizen, and customize them for a unique approach to quality improvement. This approach would have to be imbedded in Corning's vast global operations.
Initially, "quality" meant focusing on product quality. But as a strategic imperative, it became a process to position the company as a leader in innovation, manufacturing, and commercialization of products, and as a driver to greater profitability. This continual improvement approach was achieved by setting bold goals and expectations, using cross-functional teams to leverage outcomes, and expanding the term "quality" to "performance excellence," indicating the comprehensive inclusion of all business practices
Once the essential strategy was determined, it became evident that the company's new quality leader would have to provide a collection of performance excellence tools. Six Sigma training programs were expanded and would cover more subject matter and would be available for more personnel at all levels of the organization.
Globally, 70 percent of Coming's resources-both in manpower and expenditures-are devoted to manufacturing; thus, a principal focus was to transform manufacturing operations. Numerous approaches were used:
• Corning customized DMAIC tools for both operational and deep process improvement knowledge. When a Corning team works through the steps, tollgates at the end of each phase track progress. The company also maintains a database of completed projects that every employee can access.
• The company created individual DMAIC (iDMAIC), an online offering allowing one person to learn and apply Six Sigma methods to a personal project, as opposed to the more common practice of three- to 10-person project teams. Enabling one-person projects not only provides for far more learning, but it also avoids the temptation of project and meeting proliferation and promotes Six Sigma certification.
• Corning customized a new Design for Six Sigma tool to create new and innovative business processes and applies this method when a new process is needed or when a process is so broken that it needs to be replaced.
• Corning used lean to reduce waste and improve business process flow.
• The company developed an innovation process to support new product and technology development.
• Six Sigma and other continuous improvement tools were applied to sales and marketing. Corning has found, cataloged, documented, and published best practices for more than 50 common processes related to sales calls, proposals, market analyses, and forecasts.
To drive performance excellence across all disciplines to achieve corporate goals, Corning focused on embedding performance excellence practices across the broad spectrum of the multidivision, global company. The implementation team provided training, conducted benchmarking, launched Six Sigma projects, and supported teams dedicated to process improvement.
As of 2011, 3,000 employees had been trained in Six Sigma, and performance excellence champions were embedded in each division and manufacturing facility globally. Nearly 1,000 formal improvement projects were completed in 2011. Every year, Corning employees complete 100,000 personal improvement projects. On average, each employee uses performance excellence tools four times annually. Over an eight-year period, performance excellence saved Corning $1.5 billion.
Contrast Corning's journey to the Quality in Practice case about Xerox in Chapter 1. What similarities and differences do these organizations have?