Why Corning breathes TQM.

• Author: Shapoff, Stephen H.
• Position: Total quality management - Interview with Corning Senior VP and Treasurer Sandra Helton - Interview

In late 1983, Corning's CEO, Jaimie Houghton, called together his executive troops and announced the then $1.6-billion company was about to embrace the total quality management concept.

"We all went back to our offices and asked, 'What does that mean?'" laughs Sandra Helton, now Corning's senior vice president and treasurer.

Today, after several years of intensive training and a decade of applying the TQM approach, all of Corning's employees are students of the quality concept. They know the lingo - continuous improvement, empowerment, customer focus, manage by prevention - and they're watching their diverse firm turn the techniques into profitability. At the close of 1995, Corning was a network of some 200 companies with reported revenues of $5.2 billion.

Here, Stephen H. Shapoff, CFO of Ivy Hill Corporation (a Time Warner company that specializes in packaging) and a member of Financial Executive's editorial advisory board, asks Helton where the company - especially the finance department - now stands on the total quality approach.

STEPHEN H. SHAPOFF: When CEO Houghton voiced his intent to start a total quality initiative, did everyone welcome the initiative?

SANDRA L. HELTON: Most people did. The finance department employees responded well, perhaps because they knew I was one of the 12 employees on the project's advisory council. I did initially spend a significant amount of my time working with finance employees to nurture them through the process, but now we've all adapted.

SHAPOFF: It's been 13 years since you started TQM. How far has it penetrated finance? Is the excitement still present?

HELTON: As you know, our entire organization works under the quality principles. Although the treasury division has been involved in quality management since the beginning, in 1991 we knew we needed to reach a new plateau. So we set a quality strategy with one goal: to be perceived as the world-class provider of quality services. We measure this through feedback from our customers, employee satisfaction and motivation, benchmark comparisons, and the frequency with which we're sought out as the best information source, both internally and externally.

We think of our customer as an investor, whether a debtholder, shareholder or a business unit seeking service from us. We view all work as a process, from cash-management transactions to working with a group of investment bankers and outside counsel to define the processes, from first-time financing transactions to analyzing how we provide financial input to the businesses.

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