Shaw Resources. has improved organizational performance at both the executive and operational levels in diverse industries. Hospitals, medical groups, high-tech/computer and aerospace companies, banks, and home construction companies have all proven that implementing Shaw’s Customer-Inspired(r) Excellence increases revenues, decreases costs, improves employee morale and customer retention.
Clients have included such household names as Bank of America, Hexcel Corporation, Cedars-Sinai Hospital, and Stanford University Medical Center. The following are selected comments by clients.
“It gave us the breakthrough perspective on how the organizations functions. It enabled us to focus on the key processes as the patient sees them. It is not a fad – we are still using the system today.”
— Dr. David Druker, COO, Palo Alto Medical Foundation
“A hospital should not undertake an initial Baldrige application without the type of expert consulting support that Jim and Wayne provided to the Children’s Hospital of Orange County.”
— Beth Rowett, Vice President of Quality, Children’s Hospital of Orange County
“When you measure it, it becomes important. And once you’ve used Jim’s Process Profile® [diagram] to define the process, you’ve created the ability to measure the process.”
—Roger Hite, Chief Operating Officer, Dominican Santa Cruz Hospital
“This way of looking at defects and quality—from the customer’s perspective— makes sense to us, and we’re applying these principles every day.”
—Lisa Kalmbach, President, Kaufman and Broad—South Bay, Inc.
“Customer Quality Improvement allows you to begin changing the perception of what quality is and how to judge it. You may be doing this fantastic job on something, but it may not be what’s expected…you learn that there may be another way to do it. Even though you may have done it a certain way for the past many years, you begin to think you might do it differently. This allows you to remain competitive.”
—Remo Cerruti, M.D., Chief of Professional Services, Washington Hospital
“We’ve always measured our quality by the standards of the healthcare professionals, not by the measures of patients. It was the caregiver’s agenda, not the patient’s agenda. Through process management, we got a different viewpoint on what we have taken for granted.”
—Joann Zimmerman, Assistant Director of Nursing for Medical/Surgical, Stanford University Hospital
“I think one reason that our previous quality efforts have not been the solutions we hoped for is that they tried to solve problems within the confines of one department. Once we saw the flow-charts it was clear to us that this would not work. Patients move from one area to another and they don’t care that they may have crossed an organizational boundary. They judge their total experience in the hospital. This was even more dramatic when we took the additional step of completing a flowchart from the patient’s perspective.”
—Judy Lanigan, Process Owner of the Provide Diagnostic & Treatment Support Team and Assistant Director of Nursing for Ambulatory/Psychiatry, Stanford University Hospital
“But customers don’t want to know about the inner workings of an organization or to hear excuses about why it is difficult to meet their expectations. They evaluate the care experience they receive at a hospital on criteria that we as healthcare professionals may not have considered or acknowledged. These criteria are most freely available in the form of customer complaints, and in fact analyzing complaints became our lowest cost, most accurate source of information about what needs improvement at Dominican Santa Cruz from the perspective of our patients.”
—Sister Julie Hyer, President and CEO, Dominican Hospital, Santa Cruz, California
“Our patient volume went up 12% and we are attracting new physicians. We can’t directly tie these bottom line results to process improvements but we can say process improvement is responsible for better communication up and down the organization. Senior management has a much clearer idea about how work is done in the organization and we are instituting changes that make a difference to customer satisfaction and employee morale.”
—Dr. Ross DiBernardo, Vice President of Medical Affairs, St. Johns Pleasant Valley Hospital, Pleasant Valley, California
“Healthcare must be more customer focused because it is becoming more market driven. Jim Shaw demonstrated to us that every one of our activities could be adapted to a customer-inspired® quality improvement approach. Using his methodology made our teams more effective, more focused, and more results oriented.“
—Dan Herlinger, CEO, Catholic Healthcare West (CHW) Central Coast, Ventura County, California