ShodoManagement.docVIP

Shodo Management In Japan, marketing and manufacturing have blended into a seamless flow of activities targeted to everrising levels of customer satisfaction. A hospital is a factory. Admittedly, its a different kind of a factory. After all, it provides one of the most intimate of all human services. And certainly hospitals have a different relationship with their customers. They often invert them. But as Willis Goldbeck once observed, The human body is not wildly variable by Zip code. Hospitals and doctors are in the manufacturing business no matter how much they would like to feel otherwise. The insistence on viewing themselves as artists and craftsmen joined in a labor of love has done much to retard the benefits of standardization and routinization that are key ingredients in creating quality and value. Henry Ford took the industrial revolution to new heights by reinventing manufacturing in America. He introduced the rigid assembly line where everything moved through in lock step. You cant argue with the kind of impact that Fords thinking and his approach had in terms of creating world dominance for American manufactured goods. But it had some serious side effects too. The assembly line sent defects and problems right on down the line where they piled up to be reworked or got delivered to the customer. It reduced workers to task specialists and moved decisions away from the work. It generated assembly line thinking in a lot of functional silos within organizations largely along departmental lines - finance, marketing, engineering, manufacturing became specialty bunkers. Although hospitals have always viewed themselves as much more than factories, many of their approaches to getting work done came right out of Henry Fords manufacturing plants. Goals are set on the basis of departments. Departmental goals are substituted for process. Delays and errors become inevitable. Different departments with different goals and priorities make problems w