I just finished reading Atul Gawande’s book The Checklist Manifesto. Now I am thinking about how to apply it to processes at Package Machinery: marketing and sales processes, wrapping machinery design, wrapping machine building, training and installation.

You may have seen his articles in the New Yorker magazine. Gawande is a surgeon in Boston and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. While his book is primarily about how checklists can improve outcomes in medicine by demonstrating how that has worked for him in the operating room and how it works in the airline industry, his concepts have applications for all of us in our daily as well as business lives.

Package Machinery has had checklists for installation and training and for machine assembly but now we know they need regular revision and updating. in light of issues we have had, we have developed a checklist for discussion entitled Expectations in which we look at making sure we understand what our customer’s expectations are, whether we can meet them and make sure they have the capability to meet their own. We do run off and testing in our facility before we ship to a customer to make sure we have done it all right and we have checklists for that.

ISO 9000-9001 does this in another way by documenting processes within the organization. WHile ISO 9000-9001 is a great corporate goal, I think checklists will get us most of the way there.  Somehow I think Atul Gawande’s book is a much easier read than ISO guidelines.

Kate