Session 15+16 - Quality Analytics Simulation

Quality Analytics Simulation

Reading: Quality and Process Improvement

Table of Contents:

• Introduction to Total Quality Management
• Defining “Quality”
  • The Pioneers of Quality
    • W. Edwards Deming
    • Joseph M. Juran
    • Philip B. Crosby
  • Quality based on Customer Satisfaction
    • High-performance design
    • Conformance
• Costs of Quality
• Employee involvement in TQM
• Continuous Improvement
• Systematically Improving Quality

What is Quality?

Pioneers of Quality

The distinctive perspectives of three pioneers help us to understand the basis for many of the different approaches and tools used today to monitor and improve quality:

W. Edwards Deming

The foundation to Deming’s philosophy of quality management is Statistical Process Control (SPC). This uses statistical methods to monitor the quality of output from individual operations along a process. In a nutshell, this philosophy calls to continuous improvement of the production process to achieve conformance to specifications and reduce variability. Deming’s approach to process improvement focused on a broad range of actions, titled Deming’s 14 Points.

Joseph M. Juran

Juran defined quality in terms of the customer, and advocated that the costs of quality can be better understood by organizing them into categories (listed below). He also emphasized the importance of three interrelated managerial processes, termed the Quality Trilogy.

Philip B. Crosby

Crosby defined the cost of poor quality to include lower productivity, lost sales, equipment downtime, and poor service, to name just a few. In his view, a company’s objective must be zero defects. Quality excellence is achieved through clear goals and standards (rather than statistical data), strong organizational commitment, redesigned processes to remove error-causing situations, and open communication between management and employees.

Defining Quality on Customer Satisfaction

There are generally two competitive priorities of high-performance design and conformance relate quality to customer value. Really this just means there are two things to look out for, how cool you design something, and how well you can meet that design.

High-Performance Design

There are many aspects to high-performance design:

1. Basic Performance: Customers generally expect these to be offered, for example, cpu speed, ram, disk size, etc. Or for like news delivery, basic performance might simply be delivering dry news papers regardless of weather
2. Supplemental Features: As the name suggests, these are the “bells and whistles,” something like water fountains on a golf course.
3. Reliability: The likelihood a product is working properly or service being performed during a specified period.
4. Durability: The amount of use one gets from a product before it deteriorates.
5. Support: The availability of support services, such as repair and maintenance, after the initial sale of the product or service.
6. Psychological Impressions: The subjective perceptions of customers, such as the brand image, reputation, and aesthetics of the product or service.

Conformance

Conformance is simply defined as the consistency with which the firm meets these specifications.

Costs of Quality

When a process fails to satisfy its customers or meet expectations, the failure is considered a defect. The cost of quality can be categorized into these segments:

1. Prevention Costs: costs associated with preventing defects before they happen
2. Appraisal Costs: costs associated with measuring and monitoring activities related to quality
3. Internal Failure Costs: costs associated with defects found before the product or service is delivered to the customer
4. External Failure Costs: costs associated with defects found after the product or service is delivered to the customer

Furthermore, there are societal concerns of quality. The costs of quality go beyond the out-of-pocket costs, and include the costs of lost customers, loss of reputation, and even the costs of injuries and deaths.

Employee Involvement in TQM

In TQM, everyone in the organization must share the view that high quality is an end in itself. Errors or defects should be caught and corrected at the source, not passed along to an internal or external customer.

One way to achieve employee involvement is the use of teams. The three approaches to teamwork most often used are:

1. Problem-solving teams: also called quality circles, these teams are small groups of supervisors and employees who meet to identify, analyze, and solve production and quality problems. The philosophy behind this approach is that the problem who are directly responsible for making the product or service are the best able to consider ways to solve the problem.
2. Special-purpose teams: an outgrowth of the problem-solving teams, they address issues of paramount concern to management, labor, or both.
3. Self-Managing teams: A small group of employees who work together to produce a major portion, or sometimes all, of a product or service.

Continuous Improvement

Based on a Japanese concept called kaizen, is the philosophy of continually seeking ways to improve operations. Here we introduce the plan-do-check-act cycle, also called the Deming Cycle.

Systematically Improving Quality

TQM’s foundation must be translated into systematic approaches for identifying and enhancing quality for a competitive advantage. One of such models is Six Sigma.