Product Quality And Quality Strategy Essay

Given the highly competitive nature of today’s markets we as a company must provide high quality products to survive. Quality itself has become a major competitive factor and in many ways is a contributing factor in success or failure. The intent of this memo is to identify, explain and evaluate the three types of cost associated with quality.

This week’s assignment is about evaluating the quality issues of three organizations. The three sectors I chose to evaluate are manufacturing, service and government. I will then discuss the importance of quality to each organization, the relationship of quality to customers, the leadership commitment to quality and the alignment of quality to the organization’s strategic goals and objectives.

To be effective, organizational structure should be established after an organization’s strategy (Pryor, et.al., p. 1-4). Because an organization is tied closely to the Five P’s (Purpose, Principles, Processes, People, and Performance), Strategic Quality Management should permeate its entire breadth. An organizations mission, vision, goals, and objectives should include dedication to the act of providing customer satisfaction through a clear definition of quality. Its principles should include a focus on customer-based quality management, as should its processes people, and performance. Once the strategy is determined, the organizations systems and structure should compliment its dedication towards Strategic Quality Management.

Producing a quality product, whether a tangible item or a service, is the goal of all organizations, how this goal is achieved will be the challenge. Quality of the end product has been an obstacle in America for decades. In the post World War II era as production of products in America rose, the quality of those products diminished. At the same time other countries such as Japan were not experiencing the same quality issues.

The quality management completely says about the reputation of organization. Maintaining quality of the product helps to meet the stakeholder’s requirements.

Good quality product usually is brand-name products; they have 10%-15% market shares and 20% profit in these kinds of products, controls by international consortiums and the big companies.

It is important to maintain Quality of their product because Quality items keep up consumer loyalty and consistency and reduce the danger and expense of providing defective products. Firms have things they must consider such as: Customer Expectations, their reputation, meeting company standards, the most important one which is cost.

The discerning customers nowadays are better educated and are able to recognize the quality of products or services, rather than just looking at the price. As competition between organizations grows more intense, many different factors and dimensions would be considered by the customers when they are going to measure the quality (Stevenson, 1999). In order to remain competitive among those rigorous competitions in the dynamic changing business environment, organizations have to maintain and enhance the quality of the products or services being delivered.

The customer that spends his or her hard earned money on a product or service is the primary reason for quality management to be a major factor for a company’s business process. The mission and vision statements of various corporations are often worded with the quality of a product and the satisfaction of the consumer. This notion is fine; however, it takes discipline and commitment to truly achieve it. This commitment must start at the top of a corporation and spread vigorously throughout the entire company. Partial compliance will not yield the desired results a corporation needs to reduce waste and remain competitive in a global market place.

Quality management, used by many companies, has a specific meaning within many business sectors. The quality management doesn’t especially promote a good quality for a firm, but rather to ensure that a product or organization is consistent, can be considered to have four components: quality planning, quality control, quality assurance, and quality improvement. Quality management focuses not only on product or service, but also in the way to

There are many organizations today that want to establish a useful product quality management system. In an organization there are different locations, business units, and departments that can often use separate processes to solve product deficiencies. This can lead to confusion down the line. Lifecycle is one method that can improve product quality management in the manufacturing and service industries. Agile Product Quality Management can provide businesses a way to extend their enterprises where teams can dynamically update, access, and analyze information about product quality from internal to external departments, customers, and suppliers. (TechWell, agile connection, 2011).

Total quality management is defined as a companywide effort to continually improve the ways people, machines, and systems accomplish work. Management gurus William Edwards Deming, Joseph Moses Juran, and Philip Bayard Crosby and their philosophies on improving quality and performance excellence lead to frameworks. The U.S. Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and the international ISO 9000 certification and the Six Sigma concept are frame works known worldwide. By implementing these frameworks and concepts, companies have improved overall quality from the products and services as well as improving the employees and customers standard of living. When the company goes to implement total quality management, some of its core values are driven in order to improve the quality of the company. Those values are having “methods and processes designed to meet the needs of internal and external customers, giving every employee in the organization training in quality, having quality designed into a product or service so that errors are prevented from occurring, rather than being detected and corrected in an error-prone product or service, the organization promotes cooperation with vendors, suppliers, and customers to improve quality and hold down cost, and managers measure progress with feedback based on data.” (Page 41 – 42, Noe)

An appropriate quality strategy would take into consideration various important dimensions of quality. The approach to quality dimensions represent the fact that customers value a product keeping in mind different dimensions. In general, there are three important dimensions of quality

Joseph Juran’s first edition of the Quality Control Handbook answered a few questions of the defensive character of traditional quality control. The main focus on getting a grasp of the concept is understanding where the quality movement currently is in comparison to where it was. The 1951 book, which

Statistical methods such as Loss Function; eliminating variations of design characteristics and "noise" through robust design and processes