Quality Management Education in CBM Co. Ltd.

摘要

CBM Co. Ltd. was founded in 1974 as "Chubu Building Maintenance Co. Ltd." in Hamamatsu City, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan. CBM is a small company holding about 480 employees (including 430 part-timers)engaged mainly in building cleaning services. In 1994, "Hospital Support Department" was organized to expand the services and CBM obtained ISO 9002 certification, the first firm in the building maintenance service in Japan. Although CBM expanded its businesses in the prefecture and areas around tokyo, the company's operations were in the red because of its poor cost control. Furthermore, despite the quality assurance system established under ISO 9000s, the work standards were not specific and the final service quality fluctuated largely, which frequently caused clients' complaints. Based on this experience, CBM checked its quality systeM through Quality Function Deployment (QFD) from 2003 toward re-constructing a real quality assurance system, under the intensive leadership of the previous president who was well aware of the necessity for standardization of the cleaning services. The company created its standard operational procedures to be specific and easy to understand as Visual Manuals (hereafter VM, MultiMedia Manual) and made efforts to improve the ability of workers. As a result, CBM received the Recognition of Quality System Innovation under Japan Quality Recognition Award in November 2007. This paper focuses on the quality management education in CBM.