Quality Management for Organisational Excellence

Quality Management for Organisational Excellence

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Introduction

Total Quality Management is a process to drive total organisational effort towards continuous development of the organisation and providing a customer-focused unparalleled service. This process helps an organisation achieve long-term and sustainable success in the industry. This process also helps the organisation to continuously evaluate its development and performance and eliminate any errors or shortcomings in the process. Further, it also helps the organisation to be constantly updated with customer demand and purchase behaviour and adapt the necessary changes that will help to cater to the needs of the customers. In the following report, various theories of quality management will be assessed and based on the applicable theory, a quality management strategy will be developed. This strategy will be developed for the company named Engineering Tooling Company (ETC), in the view of the expansion of its business and on the adherence to stay up-to-date with the customer demand. This company was established in 1999 a major distributor of quality engineering tools and consumable products. This is a customer-focused company and caters to the needs of companies in the defence, nuclear, engineering, training, and food sector.

Total Quality Management

Quality Management is at the heart of management in any customer-focus product-based organisation. The total quality management theory was introduced and practised for the first time in Japan and later made popular worldwide. Total Quality Management (TQM) allows the organisation to adopt required changes and optimise the quality of its products adhering to the customers’ demands and needs (Mizuno, 2020) .

TQM can be defined as a framework or the management strategy that channels the efforts of the whole organisation to achieve optimum quality and long term customer satisfaction. This strategy involves continuous feedback from the employees as well as the customers, to carry out a consistent development process, that improves the organisation’s processes and product quality, and innovation (Antunes et al., 2017). While other management practices focus on the improvement of the individual departments, TQM focuses on the quality management of every department in the organisation collectively. This kind of management can be put to the best use in customer-focused organisations. This kind of management benefits the organisation well as it encourages constant development and improvement in the organisation’s products and production processes. The process of TQM involves the strategic use of data and effective communication to inculcate the quality culture within an organisation (Anil and Satish, 2019). The TQM consists of 8 management principles (Catalano, 2020) as discussed below –

Table 1: Princoiple of TQM

The current organisation under consideration, ETC, is customer-focused product-based organisation. Along with creating the tools useful for the demographics from a technical background, the organisation also curates instrumentation based on the demand of its customers. Thus, in order to always deliver the optimum product quality to the customers, the organisation can use the Total Quality Management approach to maintain and improve the quality standards of the products. This benefits the organisation to improve its profitability, efficiency, and innovation (Ismail and Rassokha, 2017).

In order to improve the quality of the products of ETC and the company’s global performance, the company’s strategy must be constructed based on the eight principles of TQM.

TQM strategy

As it can be observed, the products of ETC are customer-focused. The company integrates the product packages according to the customer’s needs and also curate products and machines as per the customer’s requirement. The next step of this strategy is to invite more customers, understand their demands, and to make more developments and improvements in the products. The company can achieve this goal by reaching out to the customers more efficiently through direct and indirect communication. The company will also attract more number of customers from the word-of-mouth. Thus, it’s the ETC’s prime responsibility to ensure the high quality of its products and services. The company will be able to achieve the optimum quality of its products only when there is an active engagement of all of its employees. This will be only achieved when all the employees are working towards the same goal. Thus, the company must take steps to improve employee engagement, appreciation, and communication to inspire all the employees towards working for the same goal.

The production process optimisation is the starting point to achieve TQM. This step helps the organisation to ensure high-quality product production at a lower operational cost. Thus the organisation must constantly analyse and eliminate any errors or waste processes generated during production. The product quality and delivery may get hampered if there is no proper coordination between the different departments within the organisation. Thus, under TQM the organisation must ensure that every department communicates and stays connected with other departments within the organisation. This will allows all the departments to work for a single cause and thus work as a single unit instead of being disconnected fragments of the organisation.

ETC can achieve optimum quality when it pays keen attention towards every problem, strategically assess it and then develops the solution around it. This strategy is important to ensure that there is no error in the processes. Keen assessment of every problem and shortcoming can allow the organisation like ETC to find innovative solutions to tackle its problems and thus, bring out innovative developments around the products.

In order to improve the quality of the products of the ETC, the company must constantly assess the performance of every product and bring out continual changes and upgrades within them. The quality and performance analysis inspires the company to adopt analytical and creative ways to constantly bring out changes within the products and stay updated with the trends and demand of the market. This also helps the company to take proper decisions regarding the design, production and processes within itself to improve its performance.

In order to achieve the expected quality, there must be clear communication between the leaders and the employees. If the leaders can set clear goals and vision in front of the employees and inspire them to work towards it, the organisation can smoothly achieve its goals. This strategy can be implemented by adopting continuous learning and high-performance training within the organisation. This will help the employees to gain a greater sense of work satisfaction since they will face new challenges every day and also get to learn regularly.

Quality Assurance

The nest step in designing a strategy to improve customer engagement with a company is to work on the quality assurance of the products of the organisation. The Quality Assurance (QA) can be defined as the process of generating confidence within the customers that the products of the company have optimum quality and that the customers will get full value for their money. Under the quality assurance process, the products go through various tests and the observation of expected results ensured. The process of QA can be done by carrying out various process audits and running products performance checks. The QA process helps to customer to understand that the product has been tested in various situations and that it can sustain any kind of impacts (Williams, 2016). For a company like ETC, this process is the most important. The engineering tools and other tools that are curated by the company are of extreme importance to the engineering and other industries. Thus, the company must deliver quality assured products to retain and attract more customers. Another process of ensuring quality Assurance is by getting the products quality assurance certified. One such certification is the ISO certification. This certification is the assurance from a third party body of the organisation that assures that the products are developed and manufactured at an international standard quality which is set by the International Standardization for Organisations (Purwanto et al., 2020).

Table 2:Quality Assurance certifications for ETC Ltd

Quality Control

Another important process to improve the company’s performance and customer engagement is Quality Control. The process of Quality Control (QC) can be defined as the process under which the organisation ensure that the quality of the products is maintained and consistently improved (Oakland and Oakland, 2018). There are various processes that an organisation needs to adopt in order to ensure quality control. These steps are as discussed below.

Figure 1:Quality Control triangle

Table 3:Steps to achive Quality Control

The process of quality control helps the organisation to imbibe an analytical and creative thought pattern within all the employees of the organisation. This leads to a consistent refinement in the processes of the organisation such as ETC and helps it to serve its customers well and also reach out and convince the new customers to opt for the company’s products and services.

Conclusion and Recommendations

Based on the above study it can be stated the fact that quality management acts as a catalysing agent for the growth of an organisation. In addition, it provides the necessary support that helps in incrementing excellence as well as the prosperity of the firm. However, with reference to the study, it provides detailed information regarding Total Quality Management along with its importance in the company. Therefore, it can be concluded to the fact that total quality management ensures the provision of productivity in an organisation. It results in focusing on an efficient strategy that addresses customer demands and requests. Furthermore, the study defines quality assurance and its importance in this report. Thus, it results in the inclusion of praiseworthy products that address the needs of the customer. Furthermore, this report delivers information about quality control and its benefits for productivity.

Based on the above study the organisation should adopt more employee engagement within the processes of the organisation. Integration of the process and departments of the organisation will also help the organisation to function as a single unit and thus achieve more profitability within the market. It is also advisable that the organisation keeps an analytical attitude to help itself solve its problems efficiently and not compromise on the product quality. Further, it can be advised that the organisation maintains efficient communication within the organisation. This will allow the organisation to boost employee morale and inspire them to work harder and achieve higher goals. The organisation also must consistently train the employees to improve their performance output and in turn improve organisational performance as a whole. The company must follow all the protocols to ensure the right quality assurance tests. This process will help the company’s customers to build confidence for the company’s products. For this reason, the company must ensure ISO certifications of the products are renewed timely and also improve its customer care service. Treating the customer queries efficiently also helps the customers to build confidence towards the company and hence must be considered as an important step in quality assurance. The company must also make the process of quality control very seriously abide by the processes such as getting the feedback and making the right changes in the products and processes accordingly.

References

Anil, A.P. and Satish, K.P., 2019. TQM practices and its performance effects–an integrated model. International Journal of Quality & Reliability Management.

Antunes, M.G., Quirós, J.T. and Justino, M.D.R.F., 2017. The relationship between innovation and total quality management and the innovation effects on organizational performance. International Journal of Quality & Reliability Management.

Catalano, T., 2020. Total Quality Management (TQM). In Application of Project Management Principles to the Management of Pharmaceutical R&D Projects (pp. 5-11). Springer, Cham.

Etc-ltd.co.uk. 2021. Certificates and Accreditations. [online] Available at: <http://www.etc-ltd.co.uk/accreditations> [Accessed 4 February 2021].

Etc-ltd.co.uk. 2021. Overview. [online] Available at: <https://www.etc-ltd.co.uk/about-us> [Accessed 3 February 2021].

Ismail, M.H. and Rassokha, Y., 2017. Benefits of TQM Technologies at the Small and Medium Enterprises.

Mizuno, S., 2020. Management for quality improvement: the 7 new QC tools. CRC Press.

Oakland, R.J. and Oakland, J.S., 2018. Statistical process control. Routledge.
Purwanto, A., Asbari, M. and Santoso, P.B., 2020. Effect of integrated management system of ISO 9001: 2015 and ISO 22000: 2018 implementation to packaging industries quality performance at Banten Indonesia. Jurnal Ilmiah MEA (Manajemen, Ekonomi, & Akuntansi), 4(1), pp.17-29.

Williams, J., 2016. Quality assurance and quality enhancement: is there a relationship?. [online] Tandfonline.com. Available at: <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13538322.2016.1227207> [Accessed 4 February 2021].