Reference no: EM132982586
Ensuring High Quality and Productivity
Chapter 9 focuses on the important role managers play in ensuring high quality and productivity in organizations. High quality can be thought of as work that meets or exceeds customer expectations (where customers can be both external or internal to the organization or department).
While it may be difficult to define what good quality really is, poor quality will be recognized instantly by customers, and will result in higher costs of doing business. As such, employees at all levels must care about quality as poor quality can result in dissatisfied and, ultimately, lost customers.
The following exercise is useful for obtaining an idea of the costs that poor quality can have on an organization.
- Step 1: Think about a business that you visit regularly (for example a restaurant or grocery store) and estimate how much you spend at this business each month. (i.e. $50 per month)
- Step 2: Multiply that amount by 120, the number of months in ten years. ($50/month x 12 months/year * 10 years * = $6000)
- Step 3: Multiply this amount by 20, the approximate number of students in the class to arrive at an amount of money this business would lose if a number of customers equal to the size of the class refused to buy anything from that business. ($6000 x 20 students = $120,000)
The relatively small amount of money spent by one individual each month can quickly add up to big losses over several years if a number of customers experience poor quality from the same business and look for alternatives.
The negative consequences associated with poor quality drive organizations to take steps to prevent or correct defects in its goods or services or to improve them in some way. Product quality control and process quality control are two types of quality control found in an organizations.
Product quality control focuses on ways to improve the product itself. A restaurant survey that asks whether the food and service were acceptable is an example of product quality control.
Process quality control focuses on how to do things in a way that leads to better quality. The planning of preparation, cooking, and serving methods to ensure excellent quality of products at a restaurant is an example of process quality control.