Kyocera America’s PlusOne Quality Management System
Mark Bertrand, Ken Kuang and Mas Nakano, Kyocera America, Inc., 8611 Balboa Ave., San Diego, CA 92123, Phone: 858-576-2600, Fax 858-576-7003, Email: ken.kuang@kyocera.com
Abstract
Kyocera America has developed a unique and sophisticated quality management system - PlusOne Quality System. The aim of this system is to meet and exceed customers’ expectations. The quality system starts from corporate executives with strategic quality planning and total customer satisfaction, and filters down through every employee in daily activities. The organization of the PlusOne system is explained in detail and the key quality measures are discussed in this paper. Under this system, all company-wide activities are directed and coordinated to improve these key quality measures. Kyocera America holds an annual employee champions day to celebrate the improvements and provides a forum for educating employees.
Introduction
Kyocera America Inc. (KAI) was presented with IMAPS Year 2000 Corporate Recognition Award during IMAPS’2000 in Boston. This award was given to KAI in recognition of the broad range of electronic packaging solutions for the telecommunications and semiconductor markets, distinguished through continuous innovations in advanced ceramic and organic material technologies, and for long-standing support of IMAPS and the Educational Foundation. KAI has been a leader in the microelectronics and packaging industry for more than 25 years, and has provided significant technical contributions to the industry.
The goal of the company’s PlusOne quality system is to meet and exceed customers’ expectations as stated in KAI’s quality vision and quality policy (Fig.1). To fully understand KAI’s unique quality system, it is best to start with a brief history.
KAI offers Semiconductor Package Products and Services. The San Diego facility is the world’s #1 producer of metallized ceramic packages for RF and Microwave devices (Fig. 2), a technology that’s essential to wireless telecommunications. KAI also offers a complete line of multilayer ceramic and organic material packages, for semiconductors ranging from the latest personal computer chips to ASICs and mainframe processors. To complement these products, the company offers state-of-the-art flip-chip and wire-bond semiconductor packaging services and a full range of electronic plating services.
Organizing for PlusOne Quality System
The term “QUALITY” is used rather frequently at work, home and in our day-to-day activities. Where does quality start at Kyocera? Quality starts at Marketing/Sales and Design. To exceed customer expectations and be successful we must know and understand what our customer wants and we must know how to best manufacture our products. The word “quality” encompasses all of the company’s divisions and departments from point of sale to delivery and beyond, working in partnership with the customer.
KAI consists of a diverse organization with many divisions established around unique products. The growth of the business is rapid and technology changes are frequent. The outline for the quality system must ensure each division maintained independence in a historically decentralized traditional Kyocera Corporation, and allow for rapid changes in process and product. The directive from the beginning was to develop a quality system that was the same in structure and format from division to division. As a first step toward both a unified quality system and maintaining division independence was to register the corporation to ISO9001 standards.
In the process of achieving certification to the ISO standard KAI developed an internal quality process—PlusOne. PlusOne was developed to bridge the gap between corporate directives and goals with each division’s objectives and independent operations. PlusOne became the key for a system that sparked an evolution in quality for Kyocera.
The structure of PlusOne established a uniform method for managing the quality system across the independent divisions within the company. Each division established a PlusOne Council and each Council reports directly to the Corporation PlusOne Executive Steering Committee. Fig. 3 illustrates KAI’s PlusOne Council structure. The duties of PlusOne councils are explicit and documented in a corporate procedure. Of significant importance in the procedure is the responsibility of the council to meet once a month.
PlusOne council meetings follow a schedule beginning with reviewing key measures: customer information (returns, complaints, response time), supplier information (on time delivery and PPM), manufacturing operations information (as-built quality, on time delivery, cycle time, yield, and productivity measures). After a review of these standard measures, the council focuses on trends and determines actions for improvement. Improvement actions are assigned to a team leader and a task completion date is established. The team leader is then responsible for pulling together a cross-functional team of employees and meeting the deadline for improvement. The last portion of the monthly meeting is for team reports on current project status and accomplishments. This is an opportunity for team leaders to request resources, management interventions, additional time and data, etc. The PlusOne council makes a determination to either continue or stop a project team depending on progress and results.
Key Quality Measures
Measuring division performance became critical for the councils. Each council determines from the measures for establishing corrective actions, and evaluating team results. Establishing the right measuring system was directly tied to the performance of the quality system. Since the councils meet once a month, it was natural, in the beginning, to report on the key factors once per month as shown in Fig 4. However, tracking key measures once a month has some pitfalls: The measures are always after the fact and driven by many contributing variables. Making a determination for team based corrective action and the results of team actions on once-a-month measures is difficult.
At the top of management’s concerns were the effects from team based corrective actions. Critical performance measures rarely show the impact of corrective actions in comparison to the team results. The divisions have dozens of processes and any single process has many contributing factors that affect performance. A single team effort to improve one or two factors was not likely to have an immediate impact on overall measures. The question, then, isn’t why the measures did not work, rather, how to track the system over time. If the critical measures where being impacted by the PlusOne council efforts, it would show up on the charts measured over time. Measures reported one month at a time are subject to random variations that can be normalized out by annual averages for each measure. The new and improved report is shown in Fig. 5. The 4Up measures are primarily concerned with customer satisfaction from the Quality Assurance department’s area of concentration. The measures are defined as follows:
Supplier Quality: Data are derived from incoming inspection of supplier products and raw materials in lots received. Rejected shipments are tabulated as lots that are returned to the supplier with a Corrective Action Request (CAR). The parts-per-million (ppm) is calculated based on the number of parts received against the number rejected for the month.
As Built PPM: Data are derived from manufacturing department inspections throughout the manufacturing process. Rejected parts counted in the data are either rework or scrap pieces detected from any step in the manufacturing process.
Customer Complaints: Data are derived from customer support, manufacturing, and Quality assurance departments. All forms of customer complaints are logged from e-mail, telephone, and during customer audits. Additionally all product returns are considered complaints. Returns data are derived from product returns only.
Final Response Time: Data are derived from the corrective actions that result from customer complaints and returns. This data tracks the days it takes to get a reply back to the customer with regard to the return and/or corrective action.
The reporting structure was in place with the PlusOne council, and performance measures were also adopted across all divisions. Team efforts evolved to take on projects directly affecting key performance measures. PlusOne council team improvement results focused on the quality system rather than on bottom line figures. In a few short years of working with the new quality system, the difference was clear. The affect team improvement projects have on the financial bottom line are too speculative, even with the best cost accounting systems, but performance measures provide facts. Also, teams that are focused solely on cutting cost often limit result impact because they are too focused on cost cutting rather than performance enhancement.
While the reporting and measuring system was being developed and enhanced, quality methods and processes were evolving simultaneously. The more accurate the measures became over time, the more precise management became at determining improvement activities. Key measures in the quality system are used to identify improvement opportunities in productivity, quality, on time delivery, etc.
PlusOne System in Action - Annual Champions Day
To recognize the significance of council team improvement activities, each of the councils holds a division Champions Day celebration. The council teams, having worked all year on assigned tasks, are pitted against one another in a competition. The competition is judged on team problem solving techniques, use of quality tools, and results. After each council selects its best team, KAI holds a Champions Day celebration. At the KAI event the competition is fierce with each council competing against the others. In the end, there is one team selected as the winner, but in the big picture, everyone wins. Each team at the competition has been well prepared and each has a dynamic improvement project to present. To make a judgment of which presentation and project is best, is difficult. The task of judging is made a little easier by providing the judges and the teams with a scoring sheet.
The scoring sheet provides a set of judging criteria that follows the traditional 8D approach. In the first category are 7 requirements with a score range of from 1 to 9 points, 1 being a low score and 9 representing outstanding. The judging form has two more categories in addition to the 8D criteria: 22 points are available for project results, and 15 points for presentation style. A perfect score of 100 points is available from the three categories on the form. The annual Champions Day is a highly publicized event within the company. It is a day of celebration, and a day of education for all employees to learn more about selecting an improvement project and how to use quality tools.
Summary
KAI’s PlusOne quality management system is unique in the industry and is working well to empower KAI to become a world class manufacturing company. This foundation of PlusOne system has its roots in the techniques of quality gurus like Dr. Joseph Juran and Dr. W. Edwards Deming. The Deming model of Plan, Do, Check, Act, is a good illustration of the evolution process, while the Juran method of establishing a quality council demands management support. The PlusOne quality system is an evolution of improvement methods driven by the key measurement reporting structure. Along the way of implementing the quality system, the company found the unique difference between corrective action and continuous improvement: continuous improvement defines activity taken to better a process that is stable and capable, while improvement activity on a non-stable and/or incapable process is defined as corrective action.
The quality system provides a celebration once a year that provides department to division to corporate recognition of the people. What makes KAI’s Plus One Quality System a success is the people working with the system day in and day out, living the quality message “…to meet and exceed customers’ expectations.”
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