The Dow Profile: Process-focused Best Practices

As APQC has found in many organizations throughout its 26 years of benchmarking, those organizations that are consistently recognized as leaders in process excellence have strong guiding principles that act as a foundation for continuous improvement. Whereas isolated improvement efforts may only provide a limited period for returns, an organization that adheres to strong guiding principles will be able to build improvements into daily operations and work toward a sustained competitive advantage.

For Dow Chemical Co., its quality management principles ensure that quality is a multifunction effort that expands across operations. From competitive intelligence and marketing insight to human resources and communication, Dow works to provide quality for its customers by improving internal processes. Be it succession management, knowledge management, or activity-based management, all of its improvement efforts feed into a quality management system that has produced a number of cross-industry best-practice examples.

This is the foundation upon which Dow developed the leading practices that are detailed in this profile. The information in this report is from six consortium benchmarking studies conducted over the last decade, as well as articles APQC has published.

The Dow Profile: Process-focused Best Practices is the third report in a series of publications that compiles years of benchmarking research and tells the story of an organization's continuous improvement efforts. Unlike a report that simply indicates an organization's current perspective, this series details research from the early days of improvement efforts through to the organization's mature outlook as it experiences successes.

Readers have an opportunity to examine how an organization began its improvement efforts, how its focus evolved, and what challenges it has faced. This is an excellent way to compare your own organization's improvement efforts.

An unlike a focused benchmarking report, this series illustrates how organizations make improvement efforts in a variety of ways that often intentionally or inadvertently have a synergistic effect. The result is a powerful momentum in gaining management and financial support, as well as applying past lessons learned to new improvement efforts and seeing quicker results.

Each year, Dow provides valuable lessons in process-focused improvement initiatives that lead to quality products. Dow maintains product quality through systems of standardization and process control. "Fundamental to our success," Dow contends, "are the values we believe in and practice. We want to achieve financial, environmental, and social excellence in all parts of the world where we do business. We will make continuous process toward our vision."