PERFORMANCE-BASED MEASUREMENTS - LINKING CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT THROUGH PROCESS MANAGEMENT

摘要

Since the early-1990's, Chesterfield County's commitment to continuous improvement has been ongoing, incorporating the philosophy of total quality improvement within the county's strategic plan. Supporting this strategy, the Department of Utilities began to identify and develop an inventory of all of our internal processes, linking whenever appropriate, goals and objectives. Our approach to achieving our goals and objectives is our deployment of process management. Process management includes the establishment of a process inventory at the macro, intermediate, and micro levels. We identify suppliers, inputs, processes, outputs, and customers for each process. Flowcharts graphically depict all of the "as is" steps in a process. Next, we define and establish targeted performance measurements for our major processes using techniques such as customer-supplier matrixes, cause and effect diagrams, data collection, brainstorming, the affinity process, and summarizing and displaying data using control charts. A plan of action is created identifying the goal, the process, the type of measurement, what it is we are measuring, and an explanation of how the goal will be tracked and monitored. A monthly report identifying all statistical data being tracked for the process is created. Finally, control charts enable us to pictorially identify how a process is performing on a monthly basis.