Quick Response Office Cell (Q-ROC)

Office operations can account for more than half of a company's lead time and more than 25 percent of costs, yet most companies ignore this improvement opportunity. New paradigms for office operations can increase your profits tenfold.

The traditional belief is that a company can implement QRM by forming teams in each department.

QRM Principle #8

Cut through functional boundaries by forming a quick response office cell, which is a "closed-loop", collocated, multi-functional, cross-trained team responsible for a family of products. Empower it to make necessary decisions.

A quick response office cell, or Q-ROC (pronounced "queue-rock") can attain significant reduction of lead times for jobs such as estimating and quoting, order processing, and engineering. Closed-loop is when all of the required steps can be accomplished within the team, which will require crossing functional boundaries and changing reporting structures.

Q-ROC principles:

• Find new ways to complete a job, with the primary focus on minimizing lead-time.
• Measure the reduction of lead times and make this a main performance measurement.
• Office cells replace existing departmentalized structure.
• Q-ROC members have opportunities to bring about change and make it happen.

Examples of performance improvements from companies who have embarked down the QRM path are:

• Sales order cycle time reduced by 59%.
• Engineering change order time reduced by 91%.
• Response time to customer's quote requests have decreased by 83%.
• Employees have also reduced errors by 69%.
• New product lead time has decreased by 71%.

QRM International Conference Update

180 people attended the 6th International Conference on Quick Response Manufacturing "Keeping Manufacturing Strong" in Madison, Wisconsin. Two employees from Alexandria Extrusion Company presented the topics "Reduce Bottlenecks, WIP, Shop-floor Congestion and Lead Time with POLCA: A QRM Material and Production control (push/pull) System". Alexandria Extrusion Company has been a member of the QRM Center since 2003. For more information about Quick Response Manufacturing, please log on to www.qrmcenter.org.

QRM - Not Just Another Buzzword, But A Way of Life.