efforts. They are signaled by defects, complaints, high costs of poor quality, and other deficiencies. (See Section 5, The Quality Improvement Process.)
Periodic Process Review and Assessment. The owner conducts reviews and assessments of cur- rent process performance to ensure that the process is performing according to plan. The review should include review and assessment of the process design itself to protect against changes in the design assumptions and anticipated future changes such as changes in customer needs, new tech- nology or competitive process designs. It is worthwhile for the process owner to establish a sched- ule for reviewing the needs of customers and evaluating and benchmarking the present process.
As customer needs change, process measures must be refined to reflect these changes. This contin- uous refinement is the subject of a measurement management subprocess, which is established by the owners and team and complements the customer needs subprocess. The two processes go hand in hand.
The process management category in the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award criteria (1998) provides a basis for management review and assessment of process performance.
Other external award criteria from worldwide sources, as well as many national and internation- al standards, serve as inspiration and guidance for owners and teams contemplating process reviews. (See Section 14, Total Quality Management, and Section 11, The ISO 9000 Family of International Standards.)
THE INTEGRATION OF PQM WITH TQM
The criteria of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award have come to be regarded as the de facto definition of TQM. (See Section 14.) Process quality management is an important concept within the TQM framework.
Organizations have learned not to limit managerial attention to the financial dimension. They have gained experience in defining, identifying, and managing the quality dimension. They are accustomed to thinking strategically—setting a vision, mission, and goals, all in alignment. And they will have experience reviewing progress against those goals.
The quality improvement process, which began in Japan in the 1950s and was widely deployed in the United States in the early 1980s, was an important step beyond functional management. Organizations found that quality improvement required two new pieces of organization machinery— the quality council and the cross-functional project team. The Quality Council usually consists of the senior management team; to its traditional responsibility for management of finance the responsi- bility for the management of quality is added. The project team recognizes that, in a functional organization, responsibility for reduction of chronic deficiencies has to be assigned to a cross- functional team.
PQM is a natural extension of many of the lessons learned in early quality improvement activi- ties. It requires a conceptual change—from reliance on functional specialization to an understand- ing of the advantages of focusing on major business processes. It also requires an additional piece of organization machinery: an infrastructure for each of the major processes.