ZJZ Quality Department - Essay Example

ZJZ Quality Department Taking into account past problems with suppliers and low quality products and new opportunities, ZJZ Corporation will need a quality department to ensure high quality of raw materials and end products produced and delivered by the company. The role of the quality department is to establish quality standards, provide quality control and make necessary changes in production and composition of products. For ZJZ Corporation, quality department is important because high quality is in place on both the corporate and unit levels.

In cosmetic industry, quality is the main creation which determines overall success of projects. "Launching a quality campaign necessitates major investments of time, capital, and managerial resources in training; implementation of quality improvement techniques such as SPC and design quality management" (Ahire, Golhar 1996, 1). Quality control is an important determinant of final quality and it could be crucial to newly-introduced products since unexpected defects and malfunctions may have to be designed out.

As products mature, competitors come out with copycat offerings, and in general, design know-how gets diffused across the industry, as the determinant both of quality delivered to customers and of quality differences among competitors. In this case, the quality department can monitor recent changes and innovations on the market and initiate changes. Following Rose (2005) a designed of the product does not guarantee superior quality. The functions and responsibilities of the quality department will be to monitor and control research projects and production of products and their components.

The quality department will help ZJZ Corporation to establish culture of quality as a main organizational value. The purpose underlying all quality assurance efforts is to establish both methods and philosophies of working which lead to improved outputs (quality and value) as well as techniques for keeping track of progress toward these output goals. At another, more important level, the quality department must control employee responsibility for quality and task performance. Time-to-market, setup time, and response time represent respectively the conceptualization, construction, and communication stages and product quality depends on their being in balance with one another as well.

The comparative analysis provided by Ahire and Golhar (1996) show that the quality departments and strict quality control is crucial for large companies operating on the global scale. When picking a leader for this department, engineering and management skills alone would not suffice. To succeed, the quality department will need to establish strict improvement tools and techniques and to develop a comprehensive quality related overview encompassing both management and technical systems. Its members should focus first on teaching key people at each facility the necessary familiarization, team building, training, and trouble-shooting skills, then concentrate on facilitating and monitoring their efforts.

Once employees have developed the necessary sense of commitment and have shown that they can help improve the bottom line on an ongoing basis, they expect and deserve to share in the revenues generated by their additional efforts. The quality department will offer expertise and check quality certificates on all coming products. The benefits of the quality department are systemic rather than piecemeal perspective, professional assistance in defining and emplacing the appropriate approach to quality, up-front involvement of all key stakeholder groups in order to take advantage of their expertise and to gain their commitment, an integrated network of project teams that facilitates the necessary free flow of communication (Rose 2005).

Initial emphasis should be on familiarization with standards and quality control as a means of rapidly getting people involved and fostering the necessary commitment. The quality department should provide support to the project teams and help them to achieve overall objectives. Only then will the quality improvement that they advocate have a chance of becoming a reality.References1. Ahire, S.L., Golhar, D.Y. (1996). Quality Management in Large vs Small Firms. Journal of Small Business Management, 34 (2), 1.2. Rose, K. H. (2005).

Project Quality Management: Why, What and How. Ross Publishing.