4.4 Improving quality Flashcards
What is quality?
Quality is measured by the extent to which an operation meets its customer requirements. A quality good or service is ‘fit for purpose’.
What does a quality operations process require?
- A clear defintion of what its targets are; these should be set to meet the customer requirements.
- Systems to achieve these targets.
- Training of employees so that they have the necessary skills.
- Ongoing measurement of what is achieved relative to the targets.
- Action to be taken if performance does not meet the targets.
Who is Edward Deming a major contributor for?
What did he introduce?
- Contributor to thinking on quality.
- Introduced the PDCA cycle.
What does the PDAC cycle include?
- Plan: Plan what you have to achieve & how to achieve it.
- Do: Put into action the necessary processes & systems.
- Check: Check the results. Measure outcomes: are you achieving your targets consistently?
- Act: If you are hitting your targets, then set more demanding quality targets if you are not achieving targets consistently then review why and take action.
Why is quality so important?
- Reputation.
- Price.
- Customer satisfaction.
- Repeat sales.
- Standards/ legislation.
How can quality be achieved?
- Understanding customer requirements.
- Training.
- Investment in technology.
- New processes.
- Selecting the right partners.
Ensuring quality can be done in what two ways?
- Quality control
- TQM (Quality assurance)
What is Quality Assurance?
The maintenance of target quality by attention to detail at every stage of the process.
What is Quality control?
Is a system of maintaining standards by testing or inspecting the output against standards.
What is involved in quality assurance process?
- Teamwork.
- Quality circles.
- Technology.
- Kaizen.
- Training.
- Lean production.
- Empowerment.
Theory X??
What does this theory assume?
What must management do?
What do the organisations tend to be like?
What is delegation like?
- Assumes employees are naturally unmotivated & dislike working & this encourages an authoritarian style management.
- According to this theory, management must actively intervene to get things done.
- X Type organisations seem to be top heavy, managers and supervisors required at every step to control workers.
- There is little delegation of authority and control remains firmly centralised.
Theory X management
What does it assume workers are?
- Dislike working.
- Avoid responsibility & need to be directed.
- Have to be forced, controlled and threatened to deliver whats needed.
- Need to be supervised at every step, with controls put in place.
- Need to be enticed to produce results; otherwise they have no ambition/ incentive to work.
What are the benefits of improving quality?
- Reputation.
- Price.
- Customer satisfaction.
- Repeat sales.
- Standards- legislation
- Competitive.
- Reliable.
- Brand image.
- Goodwill through word of mouth.
What are the difficulties of improving quality (what may employees think)?
- Believe the business is doing well enough as it is & not see need to set higher targets over time. May resent this & perceive it as a criticism of what currently do.
- See improving quality as extra work & not understand why they should bother unless paid more.
- Be unwilling to suggest improvements, believing this is the management’s job not theirs.
- Be unwilling to undertake all the administration required to measure & check progress.
What did Philip Crosby ( a famous writer on quality) state the absolutes of quality are…?
- Quality is conformance to requirements (quality is about meeting targets.)
- Preventing defects is preferable to inspection & correcting mistakes. (quality assurance is better than quality control.)
- Zero defects should be the target (don’t accept failure of any kind & keep aiming for better.)
- The cost of quality should be measured in terms of the costs of not conforming.
