Quality, Customer Satisfaction, Design Target, Technical Procedures, Work Place

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.

The purpose of this project was to gain experience in quality improvement by working with an organization to identify a business problem, analyze the causes, develop an improvement plan, implement changes, and to verify the effectiveness of the solutions. For this project we had to keep scope in mind. This project had to follow certain criteria, such as: that it is a manageable project with a local organization, it can be completed within the time frame of the course, it has a direct impact on external customers, it is relatively simple, and that it is not something that is currently undergoing major changes.

For each initiative, use a Critical to Quality Tree to analyze & understand the key quality items that create value for the customer

Product needs to be extensively tested in a live warehouse environment before it can be rolled out to the customers so a well-defined quality plan needs to be established it is important for the company reputation not to hand over bad quality product as stated by Wysocki "A sound quality management program with processes in place that monitor the work in a project is a

Quality Circles as mentioned above was the key to success for better involvement of employees with management & better setting of goals related to qualified products.

General observations: There are mechanisms throughout the project to ensure the quality of the product such as review and signoff, JAD sessions, and unit testing. However, the general feeling is the QA team is still the owner of product quality. Therefore, the project team looks for the QA team to dictate quality processes. As AOD moves to an iterative methodology, the project team owns product quality. The project team needs to be trained to understand the role of quality within an iterative process.

Quality. Such a simple word with a multitude of meanings. I must admit, prior to this course, I was rather naïve about what quality entailed. I definitely did not have a concrete definition of what quality was or stood for. It simply seemed as though quality was something that worked most of the time. After the studies from this course I have a much better grasp of how to define quality and what exactly quality means in various areas of life and business. For instance, the 11 Baldrige Principles of Quality are an easily used metric for defining the quality of an organization. Previously, I never would have used these 11 principles to define an organization as quality. Now, I find it hard not to view an organization in relation to the 11

Analyzing the factors using QFD helps in converting the consumer requirements into technical requirements and determining the weighing

External customer requirements may be gathered and transformed into specific, actionable process improvements using quality function deployment, a well- structured product development process which dictates what the market requires into a program to create, manufacture, and deliver it. However, teams should collaborate to arrive at a common understanding of the customer needs and determine the appropriate technical requirement of each stage. As soon as customer expectations are met, customer satisfaction will improve, resulting in a take-back of market share and an increase in revenue.

Within every company there is a customer, regardless of what your line of business is it is being done for the consumer albeit an external consumer or the internal consumer. The customer’s needs and expectations should be the driving force behind the decisions we make and the problems we solve…the customer, not our own personal or monetary gain. As quality improves we have to make sure that we are improving what matters to our customers not want we want to improve upon for own sake.

Quality is defined as conformance to the requirement, not goodness: The first absolute explains that management must strive to ensure that during the quality improvement process everyone is getting things done right the first time. Crosby stated that in other to do this management must state clearly what are the individual roles of the employee, management must also supply the employees with the resources needed to do their task and lastly management must give continuous support and encouragement to the employees during the improvement process. When quality is defined as conformance to requirement it helps to reduce hassle and improve quality at the same time. Crosby (1995).

1- The study here is on the Quality Function Deployment and how it makes use of the matrix format to tackle some issues which are important to the planning process. The House of Quality Matrix translates the main requirements of

Implementation of excellent quality comes with a cost. The company must decide if it is really worth compromising the quality for revenue. If the quality costs exceeds the expected revenue of the company then the company must abandon implementing quality control mechanism. If otherwise, the quality would contribute to the product value and hence the revenue.

Quality function deployment (QFD) is originally developed by Dr. Yoji Akao in Japan in 1966. It had been implemented by Dr. S. Mizuno. QFD is a method to transform requirements of customers to products design. The purpose of QFD is to investigate the most important elements to develop product that closely meet the needs of customers. According to Akao (1990), QFD is one of the technique to ensure the design quality while the product is still in the design stage.

The market introduction project of a new product is as important as its design project. When a company is budgeting for a new product project, it is fundamental to include the marketing expenses in the initial budget, thus, the company will not have future surprises. Dr. Levoy, in his article, The difference between efficiency and effectiveness, he explains that it may be a waste of time if a company has an entirely efficient manufacturing process, however, at the end is not effective, or does not achieve its objective, such as bringing more clients or selling a new product, (Levoy, B., 2011). This is the importance of a marketing project, the marketing professionals can sell ideas, products, services, anything that is marketable, and if a company is launching a product I believe that the goal is to reach the customers. Therefore, to understand well our plan for Fiat Chrysler and the launching of the new Jeep Wrangler Pickup Truck, we design the following schema to explain the plan details: 1. A fast explanation of the actual market and some challenges; 2. Explanation of the nature of the new product to be launched and its industry; 3. The marketing project to introduce the new product to the customers; 4. Explanation of how we will use the Total Quality Management - TQM tools to measure and control the marketing plan execution; 5. How FCA already applies TQM philosophy to achieve client satisfaction and how we can expand the use of TQM