Quality Management Flashcards
What is Quality Mangament?
Quality management is concerned with ensuring that products or services meet their planned level of quality and conform to specifications, aiming to prevent defective production rather than simply detect it. It consists of:
- Quality assurance focuses on the way a product or service is produced. Procedures and standards are devised with the aim of ensuring defects are eliminated (or at least minimised) during the development/production process
- Quality control is concerned with checking or reviewing work that has been done. Quality control therefore has a narrower focus than quality assurance
What activities should a quality management system involve?
- Plan, to establish:
- Standards of quality for a product
- Procedures or production methods that ought to ensure that these required standards of quality are met
- Devise suitable instruments and techniques to monitor actual quality
- Compare actual quality with planned quality using quality measures
- Take control action when actual quality falls below standard. Quality auditing involves a systematic inspection to establish whether quality objectives are being met
- Review the plan and standards to ensure continuous improvement
How might one monitor quality?
By using one of the following methods:
- RATER
- BSC
- Value for Money Audit
What is RATER?
In the 1990s the SERVQUAL model was refined and is now known as RATER:
- Reliability - Employee ability to perform the service dependably and accurately
- Assurance - Employee ability to inspire confidence and trust in the customer
- Tangibles - The tangible environment
- Empathy - The extent to which a caring, personal service is provided
- Responsiveness - Employee willingness to help and respond to customer requests
What is a Balance Scorecard?
The balance scorecard is balanced in the sense that managers are required to think in terms of all four perspectives, to prevent improvements being made in one area at the expense of another.
What is Value for Money Audit?
The basic VFM approach involves identifying and measuring key aspects of performance, such as money spent, inputs purchased, outputs and outcomes achieved.
- The relationship between money spent and inputs purchased provides a measure of economy
- The relationship between inputs and outputs provides a measure of efficiency
- Comparing outputs with outcomes achieved provides a measure of effectiveness, for example, ten clients serviced (output), nine ‘extremely satisfied’ clients (outcome).
What are the possible problems when measuring quality?
- Conflicting measures – some measures may naturally conflict
- Selecting measures – care must be taken that the impact of the results is not lost in a sea of information
- Expertise – non-financial managers may have difficulty with the usual profit measures
- Interpretation – even a financially-trained manager may have difficulty understanding measures
- Too many measures – targets should offer a guide to maximise profits objective and not become an end in themselves
What is Total Quality Management?
TCM is the continuous improvement in quality, productivity, and effectiveness obtained by establishing management responsibility for processes as well as output (PRECEPT):
- Prevention: Organisations should take measures that prevent poor quality occurring
- Right first time: A culture should be developed that encourages workers to get their work right first time
- Eliminate waste: The organisation should seek the most efficient and effective use of all its resources
- Continuous improvement: The Kaizen philosophy should be adopted. Organisations should seek to improve their processes continually
- Everyone’s concern: Everyone in the organisation is responsible for improving processes and systems under their control
- Participation: All workers should be encouraged to share their views and the organisation should value them
- Teamwork and empowerment: Workers across departments should form team bonds so that eventually the organisation becomes one
What are common reasons for failure in TQM programmes?
- lack of management buy-in;
- enthusiasm tail off;
- deflection;
- rejection;
- general cynicism
What TQM developments have there been?
How does a TQM approach differ to traditional approaches with regards to Quality Costs?
Traditional quality management suggests that there is an optimal level of quality effort that minimises total quality costs, and that spending more in an attempt to improve quality beyond this point is not cost-effective.
Total quality management (TQM) philosophy suggests that:
- Failure and poor quality are unacceptable. The target should be zero defects
- Quality costs are difficult to measure, and failure costs in particular are often seriously underestimated
- If everyone in the organisation is involved in improving quality, the cost of continuous improvement need not be high
- If an organisation accepts an optimal quality level that it believes will minimise total quality costs, there will be no further challenge to management to improve quality further
How does one promote a Quality Culture?
Individuals should be encouraged not to just comply with performance standards and procedures but to also be proactive in improving their performance and the performance of others. This will require management to apply their skill in persuading and motivating staff into a true commitment to quality. Empowerment includes 2 key aspects:
- Allowing workers to have the freedom to decide how to do the necessary work, using the skills they possess and acquiring new skills as necessary to be an effective team member
- Making workers responsible for achieving production targets and for quality control
What is Continuous Improvement (Kaizen)?
Quality management is not a one-off process but it the continuous examination and improvement, sometimes referred to as Kaizen, the Japanese word, which when used in a business context, refers to activities which continuously improve.
The principles of continuous improvement/Kaizen are:
- People are the most important organisational asset
- Processes should evolve by gradual improvement rather than radical change
- Improvement should be based on statistical/quantitative evaluation of process performance
- Resources, measurements, rewards, and incentives all need to be aligned
- Continuous improvement enables changing customer needs to be taken
Tools used in the Kaizan process include:
- The 5 why process
- Fishbone diagrams
- Plan-do-check-act (PDCA)
What Quality Costs are there?
What is six sigma?
The expression ‘Six Sigma’ is derived from the discipline of statistics. Sigma is a statistical measure of variation in output. Six Sigma looks at strategically critical outcomes that affect customer satisfaction.
A score of six times the Sigma within a specification means 99.999% of the manufactured items are within the specification (3.4 defects per million opportunities).
A Three Sigma level of quality implies a 93.32% specification compliance (67,000 defects per million).
Six Sigma ensures the progressive elimination of defects by:
- Identifying the root causes of error
- Confirming the critical root causes
- Corrective action
By minimising defects, customer satisfaction should improve and this should improve profitability. A key advantage of Six Sigma is that it can be implemented alongside other initiatives such as TQM and ISO 9000.
