Total Quality Management - Land Security Group - Case Study Example

TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT By Foundation Department Total Quality Management Introduction Total quality management (TQM) entails organisation, collective effort of continuously creating an enabling environment for all its stakeholders. It involves activities centred on providing quality services to customers, employees, suppliers and the shareholders at large. Total quality management aims at seeing that this at seeing that all the stakeholder’s demand are achieved and even exceeded. It aims at creating assurance to business stakeholders that their need is being attended to as demanded. According to International Standards Organisation (2007:3), most of companies that have qualified on total quality management have their services certified under International Standard Organisations (ISO). To understand more about total quality management, we will focus on Land Security Group plc a real estate firm in the United Kingdom. Land Security Group plc Land Security Group plc is the largest dealer in commercial property in the United Kingdom. Its headquarters are located in central London. Harold Samuel founded the company in year 1944. Since then, the company has been dealing with the development of commercial houses and leasing them to their customers. Land security group converted to Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) in the year 2007 after disposing some of its assert to acquire investment equity to a more advanced quality commercial property and was certified as ISO 14001:2007. Showing that it services meet the acceptable standards. Land Security Group plc is a limited company with its share trading on the London Stock Exchange. It is a member of the Financial Times Stock Exchange FTSE 100 Index. After conversion into Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) in the year 2007, Land Security Group plc have restructured their management to have a management team that can see the company achieve its objective. The company believed that with qualified management team, it would automatically succeed. The main goal of Land Security Group plc is employing, developing and supplying customers demand in the commercial housing sector. The company believes in responsible and sustainable business that creates an honest circle of activities that benefits all stakeholders. The company has been successful and able to develop several commercial houses. They include NEW STREET SQUARE EC4, CARDINAL PLACESW1, BLUE WATER, PICCADILLY LIGHTS W1, KENT ONE NEW CHANGE EC4, GUN WHARF QUAYS PORTSMOUTH, QUEEN ANNES GATE SW1, WHITE ROSE CENTRE LEEDS, TRINITY LEEDS and 20 FENCHURCH STREETEC3, which attracts many customers and earn the company a lot of revenue. The success of Land Security Group plc may be termed in many ways one of it being a qualified management team that sees all stakeholders wills completely. Management culture and how it affects total quality management. Management is the backbone of any organisation performance. Management may see the company rise to a greater height and too may see it fail from achieving its set goals and objective. The management will determine how customers will be treated, how employees react to work and a good relationship with suppliers as well as with its shareholders. In general, total quality managements aim at. Continuous improvement: Organisations are not in a closed environment and therefore they must react to the change. According Turkish Standards Institution (TSE) (2006:20), management should embrace the cycle of activities that include planning, implementing the plan gauging on whether the goal have been achieved and then acting to the variation that may have occurred. In the above example of land security group, management are not rigid to change as we can see them accepting to sell the old commercial houses renovate others as well as build modern shopping malls like Blue Water that meets customer demand. The company also changes leadership when it demands to employ managers that are more productive. Moving with change, Land Security Group plc has been able to meet all consumers’ expectation and hence their services gaining favour from investors. Meeting customer needs: a customer is the major stakeholders in the organisation. Without customers, then the business ceases to exist. The management team should come up with an interactive policy that attract more customers to the organisation due to the quality services offered to them. According to land security group financial report (2014), the company aims at ensuring that the customer gets quality commercial houses, get insurance cover in case of any damage caused by the property and perform an annual audit review on health of commercial houses built to ensure they are up to standard. Improving employees working environment: total quality management also aims at seeing that company’s most valuable resource is protected in order to see the company succeed. Employees determine how service of the organisation will reach the consumer, the quality of product the organisation will produce and the goodwill the company gets. Employees may be affected by the way the management treats them in terms of performance appraisal, problem solving, line of command, gender discrimination, physical harassment among others management versus employee relations. Human resource management should work towards protecting the rights of employees and coming up with motivating factors that will see the employee level of productivity increase. According to land security group financial report year 2014, the company management value their employees where they pay good benefits and making them part of business for example involving them in corporate social responsibility to the community. Supplier’s relationship: each organisation needs to work out the relationship they establish with their suppliers. This should encompass good pricing, meeting payment on time as well as good communication when making orders and after making orders. A good relationship with suppliers ensure that quality products are supplied to an organisation which will lead to quality products after processing or manufacturing the product (Hoyle and David, 2007:202). It then the role of management to come up with conducive policies on how they relate with their suppliers to ensure that quality product production to the consumers is met. Work on production processes: according to the research, about ninety percent of all variation from expected result depends on the process adopted as compared to only ten percent that is contributed by employee fault. With this, management should ensure that effective production processes are adopted which see the company will succeed as per expected result. In conclusion, total quality management spins around creating the trust to the organisation stakeholders (Pryor, et al, 2007:14). They ensure that the mission and vision of an organisation are being focused on and that techniques of ensuring that quality standard services to all stakeholders are met. Total quality management policies procedure Policies enacted by management create an enabling environment, which will see the company achieve its total quality management that ensures all stakeholder welfare is protected. An organisation will fail if its management team comes up with policies that will negatively affect the culture towards total quality management. The best policy should include policy itself, a procedure to implement the policy, practices on how to carry out the policies and proof and record of how the policy has been effective. The following pyramid sums up the components of policies as given by Charantimath, (2011:60). Policy description: It defines what need to be done by the institution to stakeholders and the reason for doing it. It should be clear, precise, practical and easy to understand by the stakeholder involved. Policy should be simple to understand to ensure the targeted body by the policy does not give excuses in case of failure. Procedure and work instruction: They are always product oriented and dictate how department relate to ensuring that the final product is produced. They may be in the form of charts, photography or drawing with the instruction of how each and every task should be carried. These charts are always drawn by the employee and may seek for correction and guidance from departmental supervisors. Records: it Records document policies and work procedure to prove that processes documented were followed as outlined. Records are important to prove that the process was followed as prescribed in the policy. It is also important for company management to discover the underperforming procedure and change it accordingly Total quality management techniques. For management to be effective in ensuring that quality products reach the consumer and that the all other stakeholders demand are met, it will apply several techniques as discussed below. Creation of quality teams: some employees in this control technique are selected and who will be responsible for ensuring that any fault that occur in the process is rectified. They are also responsible for the identification of the cause of a defect that leads to poor quality products (Factsheet: Total quality management, 2013:7). Sampling techniques: the management with the help of quality team is able to choose some products during the production process in a random manner so as to examine them and see if they meet the expected quality. The importance of this technique is to ensure that the process does not produce all defective products. In case of defect, the process is stopped and rectification of the process done to ensure that the rest of the products are up to expected standards. Benchmarking: it involves the company identifying a performing firm in the same industry and comparing the products to see if they are to the standard. This aim of using an acceptable good by the community and ensuring that the product that arise from the production is up to standard or else exceed the other companies standard (Factsheet: Total quality management, 2013:7) . Obligation: it is the role of management to ensure that all people are committed to the role entrusted to in the organisation. Employees performing as planned will see different department rhyming toward producing a quality product to the consumers. This duty is mostly bestowed to supervisors who see that employees are acting on duties given to them. This control technique aims at ensuring that there are no baby-sitting employees and that all workers are working to meet the company set standards with its stakeholders. Continuous training: management should ensure that they add knowledge to employee’s day in day out. Companies are in the open environment and change is expected any time. The management should have a seminar for its employees time and again to cater for rising change. Also, the monotony of doing the same thing time and again creates boredom and hence management should be equipping its employees with different techniques of performing duties in different ways to ensure quality standard to final products or services. Continuous training facilitates motivation to employees and makes them more confident in carrying out their duties (Turkish Standards Institution, 2006:23). It also reduces labour turnover and reduces chances of defects in the production process. Finally, continuous training improves organisational productivity and as a result, it is able to compete with other firms in the industries. To sum up, proper application of quality control techniques by the management will see the company achieve its set goal quality products to consumers and to the general stakeholders. Management culture and how it affects quality as given by quality theories There several theories that try to explain the final standard that an effective management team will achieve as per set standard. All this theories aim at explaining what a quality system should contain. In this discussion, we will focus on a model by European Foundation for Quality management (EFQM). According to Hoyle and David (2007:68), components of this model aim at creating an environment where all stakeholders feel that their rights and demand are being worked on. Its principle converges on: Focusing on the end product: the management should focus on ensuring that the result of production process meets all stakeholders’ demand, including employees, consumers, supplier, government, as well as shareholders. Consumer focused: customers are the major stakeholder of any organisation. The management should ensure all their action meets customer satisfaction. Some factors like the after sale services will promote the satisfaction the customer has to the firm services or products. Visionary leadership: the management should ensure that it is composed of focused management who are there to see the companys desire to offer quality products to the business stakeholders are achieved. Detail of business management performance: all the failure due to management in the company process should be documented as easy change mechanism or for easy rectification of the mistake made by the management. Rectification of managements fault will see the company continue to meet its objective for quality services to its stakeholders. Impacting employees with needed knowledge: equipping employees with knowledge is a culture held by management who aims at providing quality services to its stakeholders. Human personnel should receive continuous knowledge to rhyme production with technological changes taking place. Training employees create a conducive interactive environment between employees and management and this will create firms productivity. Partnership Development: the company should partner with other companies that have the similar intention to the community. In the case of land security group plc, numerous partnerships with educational bodies, non-governmental organisations, media charity group has helped their services to be accepted by many peoples. Enhancing social corporate responsibilities: a company that gives back to the community has its product acceptable in the community. Consumers will be more responsive and will make the recommendation on what they want to be improved. To conclude, working together with people in the community shows that the company is concerned with the welfare of the community and to their products is at an acceptable standard. Recommendation Basing on the above-discussed points on total quality management, it is advisable for land security group to consider all stakeholder welfare. Focusing on consumers alone does not earn the companys quality products. If, for example, the management does not relate well with suppliers of their building materials, they may end up producing defective building because of supplier failure to supply quality materials. The company had experienced a major problem of their structures not being up to standard. This may have been caused by a poor relationship with their suppliers. Secondly, the company should ensure that building developer’s welfare is being worked on to ensure that they are motivated to work. Not compensating building designers as per profession demand may lead to a poor design that does not meet consumer’s expectation. The welfare of developers becomes vital when it comes to quality building and therefore it should be considered. Conclusion From the discussion above, it is clear that the quality of products that come out of organisation process is majorly centred on management action. Other factors may also contribute to quality products all of which are in management scope of control. Further, the discussion proves that quality products cannot be attained by improving one component only rather on all components simultaneously (Chartered Quality Institute, 2007:5). As observed, it is clear that consumers are the component of an organisation that mostly determines the quality product of the products produced. This does not qualify as considering the factors to assume other stakeholders of the firm since their involvement gives rise to quality products (Morfaw, 2009:17). It is, therefore, the role of management to ensure that all stakeholders’ contributions toward quality product is looked into and effected. References British Standards Institute. (n.d.) The Small Business Guide to Making Standards Work. Retrieved March 13, 2009 from http://www.bsi-global.com/upload/Standards%20 &%20Publications/Whitepapers/Small Business Guide. Pdf Charantimath, P. 2011. Total quality management. New Delhi, India: Dorling KIndersley (India. Pp. 57-70 Chartered Quality Institute (CQI). 2007. Small business standard. Retrieved 3/13/09 from http://www.thecqi.org/Documents/knowledge/small_business_standard.pdf. Factsheet: Total quality management (TQM)". http://www.thecqi.org. London, England: The Chartered Quality Institute. Retrieved 2013-10-19. Hoyle, David .2007. Quality Management Essentials, Oxford, United Kingdom: Butterworth-Heinemann, p. 200, International Standards Organisation (ISO). (n.d.) ISO 9000 and ISO 14000. Retrieved March 13, 2009 from http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/management standards/ iso_9000_ iso_14000.htm. Land security group financial report year 2014 Morfaw, J. 2009. Total quality management (TQM): a model for the sustainability of projects and programs in Africa. 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