Quality Management Different Systems, Philosophies
and Approaches to Excellence
Quality Management: Different Systems, Philosophies
and Approaches to Excellence
As is known within the field, operations management is an area of management specifically concerned with the overseeing, designing, and redesigning of business operations in the production of good and services. In order for operations to move smoothly within a business, management must ensure that day-to-day business moves forward in a manner that not only utilizes the highest quality standards, but additionally uses as little resources as needed in order to both meet company standards and satisfy customer needs in order to retain continued business. In beginning to ensure that such standards are upheld within a business, the area of quality management comes highly into play. In understanding the basis of quality management, along with the systems, philosophies and approaches that go along with it, one can better understand the impacts such systems have had on the business world, as well as better understand the adjustments that can be made in the future to maintain standards that meet the highest quality of both products and production.
Differing Quality Systems
The basis of quality management is fairly simple. When one is involved in production, different factors are obviously involved in the job process, and the end result of that production process is the assurance that quality goods have met the customer, who in turn should be satisfied. In any circumstance in which a customer is involved, the issue of quality becomes an exceedingly important factor in the business-to-customer transaction, and special attention must be made to the quality of goods produced. As nearly every individual knows within the business and management field: one bad apple does have the ability to ruin the bunch. If a customer is not fully satisfied with the quality of a product they have purchased, or unsatisfied by the manner in which the product was obtained, that customer will become a one-time-only patron, which can be a death sentence to a company's success. The key to business success within the market lies on the repeat patronage of customers, which is specifically what quality management is set in place to foster.
In understanding this basis for quality management, one can better understand the different systems of quality management that have been set in place over the years within the business field such as the following models: the quality circle approach, the total quality management approach, the theory of inventive problem solving, and the business process reengineering approach, all of which function to incorporate and drive quality improvement within a business or industry. In understanding these systems as well as their respective philosophies and approaches, one can better gauge the relative effectiveness of each system within the market in terms of the approaches and belief-systems used to back them.
The quality circle quality management approach centers on the idea that the individuals working at the ground floor of operations have the ability to best identify management solutions and quality control issues to higher-ups within the company in order to maintain that quality products, efficient methods of production and safety standards are most correctly and successfully adhered to. In utilizing the quality circle approach, an operations manager enlists a team of employees who are trained to identify, analyze, and solve work-related and quality-related problems within the workplace, and these individuals are further identified as qualified to bring their proposed solutions to higher-level management in order to improve the performance of the organization. Such a means of quality management allows not only operations managers and quality managers to be assured of the standards present within an organization, but such an approach, based in the philosophy of full team involvement consistently works to motivate and enrich the work of company employees. Despite the generally easy-going, easy-to-implement facade that such an approach gives off at first glance, the quality circle approach is in fact far more complex than one might initial garner, and several tools are often implemented within these circles to ensure any problems with quality will be swiftly pinpointed and remedied.
Members of quality circles utilize effective tools from the "seven basic tools of quality" that have been designated within the field of operations management as being most helpful in troubleshooting issues related to quality, which include: cause-and-effect diagrams, the check sheet, the control chart, the histogram, the Pareto chart, the scatter diagram, and stratification (alternately flow chart or run chart) (Douglas 2005, pp. 148). The utilization of many of these tools within a quality circle can...
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