Quality, Productivity and Process Improvement for the California DMV - Essay Example

?Quality, Productivity and Process improvement for the California DMV The California Department of Motor Vehicles is a owned agency responsible for issuing licenses to the vehicles and vessels in California. It also regulates and monitors the driving schools, traffic schools and the personal vehicle owners. The agency also performs the task of vehicle registration, renewal of licenses, collection of registration fees and formulating rules and regulations with regard to vehicles and their usage. The agency is a state-owned body, so it has a monopoly in the state. However, they want to provide efficient services to their customers. For this reason, the director of the company along with the steering committee took steps to plan a business re-engineering project. They monitor each aspect of the business functions of the agency thoroughly. This is done to find those weak points which required to be changed. In this situation when the agency’s motive is to increase their quality of service and performance, re-engineering of the business process is done. Re-engineering involves uprooting the weak points in the system totally, planning out a new framework for a solution and finally implementing the designed solution. The business policies supporting these systems also need to be changed along with the new framework. This will not only bring productivity but enhance the performance level of the company as a whole. Table of Contents Abstract 2 Introduction 4 Analysis 5 Discussion 7 Application 8 Conclusion 9 References 11 Introduction The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) is a state government owned agency which registers the vehicles and boats in the state of California. They issue driver's licenses in the state to the vehicle owners. The agency also regulates the car dealers, commercial vehicles, the private driving schools and the traffic schools. The Department of Motor Vehicles works in coordination with the Superior Courts of California. It is responsible for carefully monitoring the wrong practices, if any, and regulates the licensing activities. Its headquarters is in Sacramento. There are about 9,000 employees working in the agency in different places. Nowadays, DMV has converted its licensing and registration activities into online services through an automated system called Automated Management Information System (AMIS) (Carroll, 1991, p. 210-211). In this study we are going to analyze the problem areas of DMV, the hurdles that it faces due to the old framework of the agency, and the degrading quality of services provided by the employees. After exploring these issues and finding out the causes behind their occurrence, the probable solutions can be suggested. The agency deals with a large number of vehicle owners around the country. Moreover, the task of regulating and monitoring can be really vital when the agency is state owned and is controlled by the Superior Courts of the state. But it is generally seen that state owned agencies are usually run on the age old policies and regulations. They do not introduce any new framework or structure or strategy into the system to encourage growth. This leads to regarding quality services. The employees become corrupt and involved in taking bribes. Analysis DMV in California is a state owned agency regulating and monitoring the vehicles and boats and their owners in California. The agency is run by the government under the supervision of the Superior Courts. So it can be understood that the framework of rules and regulations is old, the structure of the organization and the functions and strategies need to be changed or amended. Major changes were required in the service delivery departments of driving license, personal and commercial vehicles. DMV mainly wanted to improve the quality of services they were offering to their customers. The performance of the employees as well as the IT department was poor due to their outdated technology and networking. So it is important to first see what quality means and how they can improve performance. Quality can be defined in many ways. It can be termed as the superiority of any product or service. It can also be viewed as a lack of any defect. It was seen that the most important reason of measuring the quality was to check the level of customer satisfaction. According to the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the American Society for Quality (ASQ), the features or the ability of the product or service to satisfy the customers signifies the good quality of the service or product. However, the organization should not only focus on the quality of products or services, but also on the performance quality of the business process and policies of the organization. If the organization designs and implements good management practices, then results are bound to be reflected. The term “performance excellence” is used to describe performance management and the results that are delivered through it. There are eminent management gurus who have defined several aspects of quality and performance management, namely Deming, Juran, and Crosby. The study would remain incomplete without their theories on quality and its usage in organization. W. Edwards Deming, Philip B. Crosby, and Joseph M. Juran are regarded as the most true management gurus for bringing about a revolution in the philosophies of quality. Their ideas on improving the quality have influenced big organizations over a period of time. Deming suggested that any product or service possessing the capability of satisfying the customer and enjoying a sustainable market can be termed as a quality product or service. Deming divided his philosophy into four parts: appreciating a system, understanding the variations in the process, theories of knowledge and psychology (Evans, 2010, p. 48). Juran is denoted as the father of quality. He added the human aspect to quality. According to him, the process by which the needs of the customers and all the designing aspects of such system are addressed is called quality planning while the system of monitoring the performance in comparison to its previous standards is called quality control. He also proposed that a few vital projects can have a great effect. Crosby mentions four absolute quality management philosophies: Quality is not elegance but an important requirement. The motive of creating quality is prevention and not appraisal. The performance measurement standard should be zero defect mark. Quality has to be measured through the price of nonconformance and not through indices. He was the one to introduce the theory of six-sigma in quality management. He considered zero-defect to be the perfect measure of quality. The committee formed in DMV was also seeking innovative techniques to develop an absolutely new solution. It was also necessary to study the business policies and the methodologies. The blueprint should be created, containing the business process of the organization and looking for loopholes that need to be filled in their policies. The steering committee must also keep in mind the legislative regulations while implementing new policies. Quality service can only be derived through great performance. So the internal performance of the organization and its human resource along with the technology can bring about effective change. Discussion The California Department of Motor Vehicles felt the need of re-engineering their business process of efficiency. They recognized the need of changing the whole system rather than just improving the old methodologies. The team also felt that a proper rule management system was required to carefully segregate the business policies, processes and logic. They decided to assign power to bring changes in business policies to the analysts rather than to the programmers. Need was felt for the re-engineering of the whole IT infrastructure (State of California, 2011, p. 6). Reengineering of business processes signifies analysis and designing the workflow within the organization to bring about positive changes and improve efficiency and quality of service. It consists of a set of logically interrelated tasks, which are performed to achieve an excellent business outcome (Sethi & King, 1998, p. 54). Application DMV had a vision of becoming the most trusted leader in the public service department of California. They wanted to serve the people of the state by providing them with quality services in licensing and vehicle related work. The agency measured its performance based on certain functions. They are: Maintaining sufficient percentage of field officers who provide effective services to customers. Maintaining all their customers for the core as well as support functions. Increase the percentage of the customer base. Increase the number of efficient employees to serve more customers. There were mainly two major issues for which the agency was planning to undertake the project of re-engineering their business policies. Firstly, the IT infrastructure of the agency was age old and out-dated applications and software were used in the IT department. This not only reduced the efficiency of the employees but also angered the customers and the customers lost faith in the functioning capability of the organization. Secondly, the agency faced a really difficult situation in collecting vehicle registration fees. The first difficulty, as we have noticed, is with the total computer infrastructure of the agency. The director of the company, Frank Zolin, wanted to bring about changes in this department. So he appointed Ernst & Young to analyze the whole situation, the problem areas and the alternatives to revive such situation. The company called Tandem Computers Inc. was given the responsibility for supplying the computers and other related equipment and applications required. It cost around $20 million. But the equipment was not functioning properly after installation and the employees could not really understand the complex implementation of the solutions in the IT department. The money spend turned out to be a total waste. The company then formed a team of employees in the agency who were given the responsibility to again study the problem and suggest suitable solutions (DMV, 1994). It could be suggested that the company can train the employees along with the task of implementing the new technology in the organization. This would not only save time of educating the employees on new technology. DMV was facing issues in collecting the registration fees through 167 field offices. DMV wanted to move to a modern system of collecting money. They introduced two different platforms with two different languages on two different systems. The first one was the Automated Fee System (DMVA) in which the servers were installed in the 167 field offices and the head office. The second one was the DMV batch fee (DMVB) based on the mainframe computers at the Teale Data Center where the renewable notice was generated (Ngu, 2005, p. 754). Conclusion The California Department of Motor Vehicles wanted to offer innovative technology to their customers so as to create a customer-friendly framework. While developing the framework for reengineering, DMV realized that their business policies also need to be reviewed. The business rules and methodologies were also primitive and needed change. So it was not only necessary to re-engineer the computer networking systems of DMV but also build proper policies and regulations to match the newly implemented solutions. DMV was a government organization, so the employees were reluctant to accept the new technology. Moreover, they were not trained and were not efficient enough to work in a technologically advanced environment. So it was necessary for DMV to not only plan out the framework for implementing re-engineering plans but also train the employees accordingly. This is also an important part of the organizational structure. The problems that DVM mainly faced were due to the age old computer networking system and its IT infrastructure. They were running on outdated software and were not capable of handling the database of such huge population of California. Secondly, the agency faced difficulty in collecting and calculating the registration fees of so many vehicle owners. DMV wanted to introduce online licensing and registration facilities for their customers and facilitate them by providing an opportunity to pay online fees. References Carroll, J. M. (1991). Confidential information sources, public and private. Texas: Gulf Professional Publishing. DMV. (1994, May 4). [Editorial]. ComputerWorld, 16. Evans, J. R. (2010). Quality & performance excellence. Connecticut: Cengage Learning. Ngu, A. H. H. (2005). Web information systems engineering: WISE 2005. Berlin: Springer Science & Business. Sethi, V., & King, W. R. (1998). Organizational transformation through business process reengineering: Applying lessons learned. New Delhi: Pearson Education India. State of California. (2011). Who are we? Strategic Planning. Retrieved from http://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/strat_ plan_2011.htm. Read More