HOW TO ENSURE QUALITY IN YOUR OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT

MADHAV RAJBANSHI

19MBAJ0228 ASSIGNMENT 3

How to Ensure Quality in Your

Operations Management

The best way to manage quality is not to make defects in the first place, and
this begins with operations management. To do this, companies are finding
that they must shift their entire focus away from who’s responsible for defects
to how the process is creating defects.

Quality guru W. Edwards Deming once stated, “Workers are responsible for
15 percent of the problems; the system, for the other 85 percent. The system
is the responsibility of management.” When Deming said system, he
meant process as it’s typically called today. In other words, workers can only
perform as well as the process allows them.

Traditional Focus Process Focus

Who? How?

Doing my job Getting things done

Knowing my job Knowing the process

Motivate Removing barriers

 Measure the workers Measure the process

The Toyota process improvement methodology (also known as kaizen) and its
offspring, including Total Quality Management (TQM) and Six Sigma, are all
movements toward improving quality with a process approach. They provide a
new way to look at quality and focus on changing the culture of an
organization to achieve continuous improvement. Without the cultural changes
these concepts propose, companies can’t realize maximum quality
improvements.

Kaizen, TQM, and Six Sigma encompass three fundamental principles: a

focus on customer satisfaction, participation by everyone across the
organization, and an endless quest for continuous improvement and
innovation.

Consider the customer

Quality is what the customer says it is. Worse yet, customers’ expectations
are always changing. So, to define quality, you must know what’s important to
your customers and keep updating that knowledge over time.

Automobile customers, for example, vary greatly on the attributes they want a
car to have. It’s the rare vehicle that can deliver to all customers on all
dimensions, especially when price is an important factor in the purchasing
decision. Delivering a product the target customer wants requires a concerted
effort among marketing, product design, and operations/production.

All hands on deck

Participation by everyone across the organization is critical to the success of
any quality improvement project. Line workers are often the first to recognize
process problems that contribute to poor quality. They perform the operations
each day and are the best source for identifying and implementing
improvements. Maximizing the potential of line workers requires that they’re
well trained and educated on the entire process, not just their individual jobs.

Upper-management support is also critical. Implementing quality improvement

projects often requires significant time and resources. Management must be
willing to suffer potential short-term productivity losses for the sake of long-
term improvement.

For example, in many innovative manufacturing facilities, line workers have

the power to pull a cord and stop the assembly line if they observe poor
quality. This could never occur if management is more concerned with the
volume of daily production than the end quality of the products.

Others need to participate as well. Stopping the line frequently requires that
employees, including maintenance and supervisors, can be dispatched quickly
to the problem area and that they have the training and ability to resolve
quality issues quickly so that production can resume.

Stick to the improvement effort

Kaizen, TQM, and Six Sigma all focus on continuous improvement, which is
the crux of any successful quality-focused program for two reasons: