We're so serious about continually improving our performance that we hired someone to work on it full time. He's Bharat Shah, who joined Swagelok Northern California this past May as our Quality & Continuous Improvement Manager. A mechanical engineer by training, he's also a certified auditor of several quality standards, including Six Sigma and Lean.
It's a tall order, being asked to come in and tell a bunch of long-timers how they could do their jobs better — and get results. Fortunately, Shah is starting with a good environment.
"The people here are very hard working people. We are all on the same wavelength," he says.
The key to improvement is in properly defining the problem to be solved, Shah says. "You don't start with, 'Oh, I know procedure.' Everything has to have a goal. If you are below the goal, find the gap where you are lagging behind. Once you have the gap defined, come up with an action item so that you can bridge the gap."
That's the first part of the now-classic method of Plan, Do, Check, Act.
The second part, "Do," is to carry out the plan while collecting data that can be used later for analysis. That's the "Check" part, where the team studies the results and sees how close they are to the original goal. Finally, the improved process becomes the new normal, the way we "Act" until we define another problem to be solved, starting the process anew.
When a second-party auditor comes in to check out an operation, a lot of people run away in a panic. Shah welcomes process audits. He likes to see the analysis done so the auditor can see how effective Shah and the Swagelok Northern California team are.
Internal audits are going on constantly as people from different parts of our operation interact, Shah says. When customer orders come down, the people on the warehouse floor can verify the procedures. At the same time, they can communicate upstream to let people know what they can do to help us process orders faster.
Shah's talents as a trainer and mentor continue outside the workplace. He teaches yoga in Fremont. Yoga: that's my passion," Shah says, and he sees it as one more tool to improve teamwork.
"In Yoga, they are teaching you indirectly about teamwork, because you are so calm and quiet that you can understand people and process the data," he says. "Yoga is something that teaches you to be peaceful inside. That helps me to work in my quality aspect of my life. Yoga and quality job go in the same wavelength."
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