Quality Management - Assignment Example

Quality Management Table of Contents Question 3 Question-2 4 Question-3 5 Question-4 6 Question-5 7 Part-A 7 Part-B 7 References 9 Question Lean operations are said to be manifested through “the elimination of waste and continuous improvement of production and service operations” These constitute the fundamental step towards the formation of a lean enterprise which in turn forms a node on the lean network, and hence it has been observed that “many organizations have adopted lean operating techniques to reduce cost, improve quality and improve delivery performance”. Drew et al. (2004) have opined that “lean can transform operations in any sector, opening up new opportunities” and it finds justification in the fact that “often inspired by Japanese car makers, countless companies throughout the world have endeavored to boost their performance by adopting a lean approach”. That organizations have realized the importance of lean operations is also evident from the fact that “a leading European telecommunications provider successfully applied lean to counter pressure on its margins in a regulated and slowing market”. Interestingly, the said company “focused initially on an area that was prompting many customers to switch to other providers: the repair of faults in fixed lines”, and subsequently identified the stages constituting the process of repairing. Finally it was observed that “by using lean principles first to find the leaks in the valve stream, and then to realign the organization and invest in team leaders, the telecoms company achieved impressive results”. Toyota is of the pioneers of lean operations and Taiichi Ohno (1988), the founder of the Toyota production System (TPS) has said that “all we are doing is looking at the time line from the moment the customer gives us an order to the point when we collect the cash” and he stressed upon the aspect of waste reduction by saying that “…we are reducing that time line by removing the non-value-added wastes”. Question-2 It has been observed that a key feature of many successful organizations is an ongoing and continual effort to improve all aspects of their performance. For this purpose the companies make an extensive use of various quality improvement tools and hence it can be observed that “the process and tools of implementing quality have become quite generic”. Some of the basic tools that are used for manifesting quality improvement are Brainstorming, Histogram, Pareto Chart, Cause-and-Effect (Fishbone/Ishikawa) Diagram, Scatter Plot, Statistical Process Control (SPC), Tree Diagram, Prioritization Matrices, Matrix Diagram, Activity Network Diagram (AND), etc.. The fundamental concept behind the implementation of these tools is that they help “establish the links between the quality of your products/services and the many factors that you can manipulate in order to improve your quality and decrease your costs”. Brainstorming: Globalization has brought with it an acute scarcity of time, and “consequently, the lead time for creative ideation is continually shrinking”. This is a noteworthy fact because “how quickly we come up with ideas is often as important as the ideas themselves”. In the context of the present business scenario, brainstorming has taken the form of creative aerobics that “utilizes four mental exercises that develop elasticity between participants’ left and right brains – the analytical and creative sides, respectively – allowing users to access solutions ‘outside the box’ and outside of their present problem-solving techniques; optimizing their productivity of ideas efficiently and without anxiety”. Fishbone Diagram: Brussee (2004) have opined that “the purpose of a fishbone diagram is to identify all the input variables that could be causing the problem of interest” and subsequently “identify the critical few key process input variables (KPIVs) to measure and further investigate”. It has been observed that “the fishbone diagram is the preferred Six Sigma tool for identifying what should be sampled in a process and which variables need to be kept in control during the sampling process” and it is implied that “without the kind of cause-and-effect analysis the fishbone diagram supports, the sampling would be less focused”. Question-3 Quality gaps may be described as the difference between the customers’ expectations and their actual experience, and they lead to customer dissatisfaction; however, Hill et al. (2006) have opined that such dissatisfaction maybe attributed to organizational gaps in terms of promotion, procedure, perception, behavior and understanding. The promotional gap is found to arise “between customers’ expectations and management’s perceptions about these expectations” and it is observed that “the origin of the problem can often be traced back to the company’s marketing communication” because of the fact that being driven by breakneck competition and “in their eagerness to win customers by selling the benefits of their products or service companies can very easily crate expectations in the minds of customers that will be difficult to fulfill”. The understanding gap is said to arise when “the managers of the organization do not have an accurate understanding of customers’ needs and priorities”; this is in contrast to the procedural gap that comes into being when organizations “have a full understanding of what matters most to customers” and yet fail to manifest customer satisfaction on account of not being able to translate “customers’ expectations into appropriate operating procedures and systems”. Behavioral gaps arise when “organizations have clear procedures which are well matched to customers’ needs and priorities but do not achieve a consistently high level of customer satisfaction because staff are insufficiently trained or disciplined to follow the procedures to the latter at all times”. Finally, a perception gap is observed to exist because “customers’ perception of the performance of your organization may differ from reality”. Owing to the fact that “no organization intends to provide poor service and gaps usually arise because of differences in perception between what the business thought it was providing and what customers believe they have received”, it may be suggested that “only regular customer satisfaction measurement” may enable organizations to identify as well as close the quality gaps and in turn enhance customer satisfaction. Question-4 The main differences that exist between TQM and Six Sigma are summarized below: TQM: It makes an extensive use of “self-directed work teams” and is centered on a quality initiative. This tool is applied within the scope of a single organizational function and it may be observed that it doesn’t call for any training in terms of statistics as well as quality. TQM is primarily a quality oriented tool that focuses on return on investment (ROI). Six Sigma: This primarily focuses on executive ownership and is observed to be a “business strategy execution system” that is actually cross-functional. Six Sigma has a strong orientation towards business results and it also calls for “focused training with verifiable return”. As observed by Dr. Joseph M. Juran (n.d.), Six Sigma stands out as a better tool than TQM because “it has succeeded in gaining the participation and commitment of top leadership, a critical success factor that every other process development program failed to achieve”. It has also been found that unlike TQM which “sets vague goals of customer satisfaction and highest quality at the lowest price”, Six Sigma “sets a specific goal of 3.4 defects per million opportunities” and virtue of being result-oriented, “focuses on bottom line expense reductions with measurable, documented results”. It is believed that “TQM swung too far towards the ‘soft’ issues of culture, consensus and staff improvement – the ‘country club’ approach” and hence, “Six Sigma emerged to replace the ‘tired’ TQM philosophy”. Question-5 Part-A In the context of the interpretation of control charts it has been observed that “the location and pattern of points in a control chart enables us to determine, with a small probability of error, whether a process is in statistical control”. Anderson et al. (2009) have opined that “a primary indication that a process may be out of control is a data point outside the control limits” and have augmented their opinion by saying that “finding such a point is statistical evidence that the process is out of control; in such cases, corrective action should be taken as soon as possible”. It has been observed that special/assignable causes give rise to “high or low out-of-control points on either a location or variability chart”. Part-B The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is one of the most popular performance measurement tools that has ensued from “the collision between the irresistible force to build long-range competitive capabilities and the immovable object of the historical-cost financial accounting model” and is used to evaluate business improvement. The intrinsic aspects that make the BSC an effective performance measurement tool are that it retains conventional financial measures and “complements financial measures of past performance with measures of the drivers of future performance”. Owing to the fact that “the objectives and measures of the scorecard are derived from an organization’s vision and strategy”, it is not surprising that “the Balanced Scorecard expands the set of business unit objectives beyond summary financial measures”. References 1. Anderson, R. D., Sweeney, J. D. & Williams, A. T. Statistics for Business and Economics. Cengage Learning. 2009. 2. Basu, R. & Wright, N. J. Quality beyond Six Sigma. Butterworth-Heinemann. 2003. 3. Bell, S. Lean Enterprise Systems: Using IT for Continuous Improvement. John Wiley and Sons. 2006. 4. Bertels, T. (Ed.). Rath & Strongs Six Sigma Leadership Handbook. John Wiley and Sons. 2003. 5. Brussee, W. Statistics for Six Sigma Made Easy. McGraw-Hill Professional. 2004. 6. Caulcutt, R. Achieving Quality Improvement: A Practical Guide. CRC Press. 1995. 7. Correll, C. L. Brainstorming Reinvented: A Corporate Communications Guide to Ideation. SAGE. 2004. 8. Drew, J., McCallum, B. & Roggenhofer, S. Journey To Lean: Making Operational Change Stick. Palgrave Macmillan. 2004. 9. Ehrlich, H. B. Transactional Six Sigma And Lean Servicing: Leveraging Manufacturing Concepts to Achieve World Class Service. CRC Press. 2002. 10. Grigoroudis, E. & Siskos, Y. Customer Satisfaction Evaluation: Methods for Measuring and Implementing Service Quality. Springer. 2009. 11. Hill, N. & Alexander, J. The Handbook of Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Measurement. 3rd ed. Gower Publishing, Ltd. 2006. 12. Kane, E. V. Defect Prevention: Use of Simple Statistical Tools. CRC Press. 1989. 13. Kaplan, S. R. & Norton, P. D. The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action. Harvard Business Press. 1996. 14. Klein, P. Fundamentals of Plastics Thermoforming. Morgan & Claypool Publishers. 2009. 15. Liker, K. J. The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the Worlds Greatest Manufacturer. McGraw-Hill Professional. 2004. 16. Stamatis, H. D. TQM Engineering Handbook. CRC Press. 1997. Read More