Quality Culture - Assignment Example

Quality Culture Assignment al Affiliation) Introduction What might be some of the dangers of relying solely on input when designing or improving a product or service? What other inputs should be taken into account? Listening to customers is always vital. It however may turn to be dangerous if caution is not taken. The field one is dealing with speaks scores, e.g. someone in food industry cannot run business the same way with someone in fashion industry. In fashion a customer may be demanding for clothes which are almost out of fashion. This might turn to be a loss to the entrepreneur if he happens to stock and suddenly the fashion changes. Nevertheless there are factors to consider that may end up raising the revenue of the company i.e. raising sales levels; sales renewal rates, the number of queries or complaints about your products or services, the number of complaints about your employees, the number of damaged or faulty goods returned, average order-fulfillment times, the number of contacts with a customer each month, the volume of marketing material sent out and responses generated, time taken from order to delivery. Measure customer service levels; how well your product or service matches customer needs, the value for money you offer, your efficiency and reliability in fulfilling orders, the professionalism, friendliness and expertise of your employees, how well you keep your customers informed, the after-sales service you provide. 2. Discuss 3 potential sources of resistance to the implementation of Deming’s 14 Points for Management. Job description shouldn’t only describe the job one is undertaking only but what that job is for. The reason being one shouldn’t just be doing it right but even better.50 year’s back Deming observed this problem which could hinder business success and said that nobody is doing his job right unless constantly collecting data to facilitate improve that work. Secondly, with lack of loyalty of service, no one is clearly sure why company is in business or its targets or even its future direction. This situation creates variations which lead to reduced quality. Lack constancy means job insecurity. Lack of sound judgement by the management could also lead to poor performance. In business fluctuations should always be expected and machinery to tackle that should always be on standby. 3. What is the difference between quality control and quality assurance? QA Q C Definition QA is a set of actions applied to ensure quality is met during product development process. Quality Control is a set of actions applied to ensure quality in products. This is used to identify defects in actual products already produced. Focus on The main aim of QA is to prevent defects by focusing on the procedure used to The aim of QC is to spot and regulate defects in finished products. Hence QC is a reactive procedure. Goal The aim of QA is to raise standards of test process and development to prevent defects from arising during product development. The aim of QC is to discover defects after product development and before its release. How To set up a quality management system and assess its adequacy. Intevallic conformance audits of the system operations. Finding & dislodging sources of quality issues via equipment & tools so as to meet customer requirements continuously. What Avoiding quality problems via systematic & planned together with documentation. The techniques or activities used to realize and maintain quality of the product quality, service and process. Responsibility Each member of the team involved in product development the product is accountable for QA. QC stands as a responsibility of a given team that carries out tests on defects. Example Confirmation is an example of Quality Assurance Software/Validation Test is an example of Quality Control Statistical Techniques Statistical techniques & Tools may be applied in both QC & QA. When applied to process (operational parameters & process inputs), they are referred to as Statistical Process Control (SPC); it therefore becomes component of QA. When statistical techniques &tools are applied to process outputs (finished products), they are referred to as called as Statistical Quality Control (SQC) which comes under Quality Control. As a tool Quality assurance is a managerial tool Quality Control is a corrective tool 4. Consider your purchase of a hamburger at a fast food restaurant. What combination of Garvin’s dimensions of product quality and the SERVQUAL dimensions of service quality would be applicable in assessing the quality of your experience? These are the Garvin’s dimensions of quality that would be applicable in assessing the quality of my experience: aesthetics; perceived quality; serviceability; features; reliability; and conformance. These are the SERVQUAL dimensions of quality that would be applicable in assessing the quality of my experience: reliability; responsiveness; empathy; assurance; and tangibles. Chapter 2 1. What is the difference between SQM and TQM? Total Quality Management & Strategic Planning According to (Aavic, 2010) TQM and strategic planning assists an organization to with tools to help it gain marketplace competitive advantage. TQM focuses the organizations objectives on a system of meeting customer needs and quality. Strategic planning is used as a tool to help to prioritize the hard work of the company in the implementation of a TQM approach. Total Quality Management TQM is method an organization applies to meet customer needs and raise the quality by controlling process. The production method requires that every member of the organization participate. Quality improvement groups, measurement and process controls identify faults in areas requiring improvement and production processes. Strategic Planning Strategic planning is a procedure an organization uses to focus and prioritize the efforts of the venture alongside the implementation of a plan. Strategic plan is used to anticipate and predict changes in the business and position the company to show response. Companies are compelled to build an edge at the market place that brings a clear difference from the organization and the rest of the businesses. Reputation and environment for client value and quality is among the approaches to meeting the customer demands. 2. Discuss the difference between a dimension and a metric? How are they related? Give examples. Dimensions: Describe data A dimension is a descriptive characteristic or attribute of an object that could be given varying values. E.g. a geographic location can have dimensions called longitude, Latitude, or City Name. Values of City Name dimension can be San Francisco, Singapore Berlin. Browser, session duration, screens, Exit Page, is examples of dimensions that emerge by default in Google Analytics. Dimensions appear in all of one’s reports, though one might see different ones going by specific report. Use them to assist organize, analyze and segment your data. In several reports, you can remove and add dimensions to view different characteristics of your data. Metrics: Measure data Metrics are individual basics of a dimension which can be measured as a ratio or a sum. E.g. the dimensions of a City could be connected with a metric like Population, this would bear the total value of the entire residents within a specific city. Average visit duration, page per visit and, Screen views are examples of metrics as seen in Google Analytics. Relationship between metrics and dimensions According to (Fairfield, 2001) although metrics and dimensions can stand independently, they commonly are used in combination with one another. The values of metrics and dimensions and the relationship between the values is what bring meaning in your data. For the best insights, dimensions are usually associated with 1 or more metric. 3. Why is the deployment phase of the strategic quality management process crucial to the achievement of an organization’s vision? Strategy implementation, or deployment, is the conversion of strategic plans into results and actions. It is the strategic plan execution at all levels within the organization. Deployment and development are taken separately since the most excellent strategic plans won’t have impact if not well implemented. Likewise simple strategic plans which are well deployed have got major impact. Strategy deployment phase comprises the below fundamentals of the model: Strategy Implementation—deployment or execution of the strategic tactics. Feedback and Measurement—the feedback and monitoring element answers the queries "How is the organization performing?" "What improvements and modifications necessary?" 4. The Admissions Office at State University has decided to begin measuring student perceptions of the quality of the services their office provides. They have collected data from high school seniors who have visited State U and two other universities in the area. Students were asked to rate on a scale of 1 to 5 (5 is best) the three universities on a number of metrics comprising the SERVQUAL dimensions. The Director of Admissions has tabulated the data as follows: Dimension Weight State U University X University Y Tangibles .10 5 4 4 Reliability .15 3 4 3 Responsiveness .30 4 3 3 Assurance .25 4 3 3 Empathy .20 5 4 2 Calculate the weighted dimension scores. How does State U compare to its competitors? Total weighted dimension scores amount to 100.Comparing the three Universities, State university comes out the best in quality of service offered in their institution with 21 scores University came second with 18 points while Y University had the poorest quality of service comparatively. Chapter 3 1. List the seven management tools and discuss how they might be used in developing a new product. The seven Management and Planning tools, highlighted in an order moving from abstract analysis to comprehensive planning, are: Affinity Diagram; puts together a huge number of thoughts into their natural relations. Relations Diagram; shows effect – and cause relationships and helps in analyzing the natural relations between different features of a complex condition. Tree Diagram; smashes down broad groups into finer and finer points of detail, helping one move his thinking step by step from general things to specific ones. Matrix Diagram; explains relationship between 2, 3 or 4 groups of information and could as well give information regarding the relationship, e.g. Its strength, measurements or the responsibilities undertaken by various individuals. Matrix Data Analysis; a complicated mathematical skill used to analyze matrices, commonly replaced in this particular list by the comparable prioritization matrix. One of the most careful, rigorous, and time consuming of decision making mechanisms, a prioritization matrix L-shaped matrix which uses pair wise comparisons from a given list of options to come up with best options. Arrow Diagram indicates the needed order of tasks in a process or a project, the finest schedule for the whole project, and probable scheduling and resource issues and their solutions. 2. How does the use of Quality Function Deployment assure that the voice of the customer is heard during the design process? Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a technique to obtain and analyze the voice of the client and transform it into product quality and requirement assurance measures throughout the build, design, product retirement procedure, commercialization and even test (Baten, 1992). Lately, QFD has broadened its toolset further to guarantee the quality of client needs which are used as the input to the Quality Function Deployment process. For majority of organizations that have got better and modern methods for tackling problems and assuring service/manufacturing delivery quality (e.g. design for 6 sigma, six sigma, an six sigma etc.), the focus as of today isn’t just on "how" to tackle a problem, but what problem to solve first and especially with resource, schedule and budget constraints. QFDs expanded toolset deals with the problem of what to start with and at best, and the same time preserving the flow down to CTQs process high quality parameters, build and service support/delivery. The procedure of acquiring customer’s voice and converting it into realistic customer needs that are solution and product independent is a U.S innovation in modern QFD. The modern VOC toolset is trained in the QFD Green belt Course, using examples from software, manufacturing, healthcare, service and other industries. 3. What are the objectives of Design for Six Sigma? Sigma six; Design for Six Sigma is centered on process generation, instead of traditional Six Sigma procedure improvement. Its objective is to find out business drivers and customer needs and integrate them into the solution formed. 4. Discuss what is meant by the term robust. Robust; to be truthfully robust, a procedure has to be able to regulate to circumstances the designers may have never thought of. So, as Geoffrey suggests, flexibility is key. A BPM solution has to give support to the ability for suitably privileged users to modify in-flight procedures to account for regulatory or business changes, or even to give space for simple variances, e.g. a manager who requests for an extra review of a request just before release. 5. Discuss the use of FMEA in product design. Design FMEA; Design FMEAs are carried out on the system or product at the design level. The aim is to analyze how the failure modes affect the system, and how to minimize failure effects on the system. Design FMEAs are used just before products are dispatched to the production operation. All expected design shortages will have been detected and rectified by the time the process ends. 6. Discuss the use of FTA in product design. FTA; Use of FTA, provides for perfect representation of their functionality interdependence. On top of being capable accounting for mixed reliability characteristics, trees representing errors are always easy to construct and transform for fast tradeoffs as roll-up of unreliability values is auto for on spot evaluation of the end quantitative reliability outcome. Breakdown mode analysis while applying fault tree method that is explained in this paper allows for true, in depth engineering evaluation of every individual ground for failure mode regarding hardware and software components, their stresses, interactions ,functions and operability. Chapter 4 1. What is Juran’s definition of breakthrough improvement? Juran’s defined breakthrough as change of dynamics. Through contrast, Juran’s defined control as lack of change; keeping status quo. Going by the perspective of Juran’s definition, control and breakthrough are equally exclusive; it would not be possible to have one while being involved with the other simultaneously. 2. How does Plato’s divided line image relate to creativity? 3. Which of Deming’s 14 points (Chapter 1) address issues that might impact creativity in an organization? References Aavik, Kart. (2011). Implementing Quality Culture. Gardners Books. Batten, J. D. (2012). Building a total quality culture. Menlo Park, Calif: Crisp Publications. Fairfield-Sonn, J. W. (2011). Corporate culture and the quality organization. Westport, Conn: Quorum Books. Read More