MAYBERRY PROFESSOR OF MANAGEMENT, COLLEGE OF BUSINESS , TENNESSEE TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY.
APRIL 7, 2005
Steven H. Hoisington is the Senior Vice-President of Organizational Excellence and Quality at Exel , Ltd. in Bracknell , England . Exel , a FTSE 100 company with 109,000 Associates and sales of USD $11B, is the global leader in contract logistics and freight forwarding. He is responsible for defining and deploying a global continuous improvement and quality strategy.
Responsibilities under this strategy include performance measurement and management, deployment of initiatives such as Six Sigma and Lean, ISO 9000 and global agency registration, customer satisfaction management and measurement, global process definition and deployment, and reduction in waste and variation. Steve is the former Vice President of Quality at Johnson Controls, Inc. in Milwaukee , Wisconsin . Prior to joining Johnson Controls, Steve managed Quality and Customer Satisfaction at IBM.
He has served as a senior Baldrige examiner for unprecedented 12 years, is a certified Six Sigma Black Belt, and recently coauthored 2 books entitled: Customer Centered Six Sigma and Implementing Strategic Change . He is member of the Institute of Industrial Engineers , American Society for Quality and serves as the chair on the board of directors for the Wisconsin Forward (Quality) Award.
How is managing quality different now from the days when it was perhaps a fad?
If you take a look at the evolution of quality over time, we used to be focused fairly heavily on inspection and audit, and that really defined the quality management system within any organization. Also there were large centralized quality functions. So today, you find very little inspection within organizations, because quality is built into the fabric of processes, procedures, and day-to-day work. It is a little bit more difficult if you think about [managing] quality [if] you decentralize and quality really becomes a part of everyone's job and responsibility. So the biggest challenge is how do you harness all of the things that are important from an overall quality perspective and ensure that your products and services are of the highest quality that customers have learned to expect over time.