Statistical Process Control for the Food Industry

7SPC Readiness Self‐Assessment Tool

7.1 Ready….?

A failure to establish sufficient readiness represented half of all unsuccessful efforts towards organisational change

(Gurumurthy, Mazumdar, Muthusubramanian 2013)

Initiating the Statistical Process Control (SPC) programme in business indicates that there is a demand for change from the common practice. Thus, managing change is very important at each level. Moreover, it is more critical for the management to assess the organisational readiness before planning to manage the change. Nevertheless, The SPC implementation in the food industry is slow despite the success of SPC in the manufacturing industry (e.g. the automotive industry) (Grigg and Walls 2007a,b; Lim, Antony, & Albliwi, 2014).

Similar to other CI tools/techniques, organisational readiness is an essential ingredient required for effective and sustainable use of SPC (Radnor 2011). In general, the company‐wide SPC application is challenged by the resistance of employees to organisational changes (Surak 1999). Therefore, it is crucial to consider organisation preparedness to undertake SPC, and this can be determined by assessing its readiness level (Antony 2014; Lagrosen, Chebl, and Tuesta, 2011; Smith 2005). The readiness assessment is an approach for overcoming any resistance to change (a critical factor challenging the adoption of the technique) (Holt et al. 2007; Kerlinger 1986; Smith 2005; Xie and Goh 1999). The readiness phase is similar to the ‘unfreezing’ phase ...