TQM Assignment 1:

What do you understand by the quality statement?

Quality is a broad term and concept which is central to all companies and anyone who
delivers a product or service. For most of time, quality has been an expectation for anyone
trading goods, services and money. If I pay for 'X', then I want to know and be assured that
that product or service will fulfil the duty I expected it to and perform properly.

Quality is the backbone of every business, because quality is what creates reputation, word of
mouth and repeat business. Without quality, it is extremely hard to build a successful
company.

Because of it's importance, there is a high level of focus, procedure and documentation
around quality management in all companies.

Many of these procedures and documents are internally focused (quality policies etc.), some
are external focused (quality assurances etc.) while some serve both.

A quality policy statement is one of the tools which companies create and use both internally
and externally.

A quality policy statement is a brief document developed as part of a business' quality

management system. It declares what you consider 'quality' in your organisation and
outlines the processes you have in place to ensure that you meet the agreed standards.
Quality policy statements are always used internally as a means of establishing a quality
baseline for all employees to adhere to, while they are commonly made public and available
to investors, customers, suppliers and regulators as a means of quality assurance and PR.

A quality policy statement is often the quality 'mission' or principles of the organisation, and
brings multiple quality standards and policies in one well presented and digestible document.
Explain the Kaizen concept with an example.

The word Kaizen comes from the Japanese words for “Good” and “Change.” In businesses
and other organizations, Kaizen refers to activities that continually improve all processes and
involve every employee from the executive team to front line workers. Kaizen, as a
foundational business philosophy, was first embraced by Japanese manufactures after the
Second World War.
The term Kaizen became known around the world through the works of Masaaki Imai. He
pend the groundbreaking book KAIZEN™: The Key to Japan’s Competitive Success.
Masaaki Imai described Kaizen simply. “Kaizen means to find a better way and revise the
current standard. Thus, maintaining and improving the standard becomes the main task of
management.”

Core Principles
 Kaizen isn’t a prescription for improvement; instead, it is a way of seeing the world. It is the
basis of many improvement methodologies, including Six Sigma, Lean Manufacturing, and
the Toyota Production System. The most essential principles of Kaizen are:
 Every process can be improved
 Continuous improvement is necessary to be competitive
 Defects and failures are most often the fault of imperfect processes, not people
 Every member of the organization must have a role in improvement
 Small changes can have an enormous impact
As Imai put it, “The starting point for improvement is to recognize the need. This comes from
the recognition of a problem. If no problem is recognized, there is no recognition of the need
for improvement. Complacency is the archenemy of Kaizen.”

There are also five instructions of Kaizen:

 Know your customer – Identify their interests so that you can enhance their experience.
 Let it flow – Everyone in the organization should aim to create value and eliminate waste.
 Go to the Gemba – Value is created in the places where work is done. Leaders should go
there.
 Be transparent – Performance improvements should be tangible and visible.
 Empower people – Set goals for teams and give them the tools to achieve them.

Examples:

1. Toyota Motor Manufacturing (U.K.)

Low-cost creative innovations such as Dougal, reducing wasteful movement by
making parts move with the workers, and speeding up tedious tasks by using simple
tools (like a sticker picker) save a total of 35.1 seconds per car—conserving almost 10
years of work when applied globally in 2018. Undoubtedly, kaizen elevated Toyota as
the world’s first company to produce more than 10 million cars in a year.
2. TOTO, Ltd.
The Japanese manufacturer of plumbing fixtures also benefited from the kaizen
approach to improving quality, with their signature Washlet selling over 50 million
units worldwide. In Sunaqua TOTO Ltd., kaizen helps provide a comfortable work
environment for people with disabilities. Kaizen led them to redesign trash receptacles
 for easier transportation and rearranging supplies for easier handling.
Toshiyuki Masatsugu thought of stabilizing hanging screwdrivers with flexible cords,
eliminating additional 3.33 man-hours per month. For a company of 100 employees
on minimum wage, his practice of kaizen saved as much as ¥13,385,476.125
($124,337.94) every year. According to Masatsugu, “It really feels like you’ve
accomplished something when you come up with a new technique like this. We all
enjoy thinking and working together to make our job better.”
3. Organizational Intervention Studies
Mail delivery workers of the Danish Postal Service have limited influence on how
tasks are accomplished and decisions about the work environment are
made. Results show that implementing kaizen for a number of years helped them
increase the level of awareness and capacity to manage issues, which led to increased
job satisfaction and mental health.
Kaizen in a Swedish regional hospital predicted better integration of organizational
and employee objectives after 12 months. The findings suggest that participatory and
structured problem-solving approaches that are visual and familiar to people can
facilitate organizational interventions.

Justify Business Process Reengineering is essential in TQMS?

In 1990, Hammer suggested for eliminating non-value-adding activities rather than using
technology to automate the processes involved. Till then, technology had been used only for
automating the existing processes and not eliminating non-value-adding activities. The focus
should be to maximize customer value by minimizing the resources consumed for delivering
the product or service. So companies started reviewing their processes and strived for
renewed competitive advantage in the limited resources and costs that they could manage.
Initially it had to face its share of brickbats, and post-1995, the accusation against
reengineering was that it focused only on processes and technology and not on effective
change management for the people. Among different product-centric strategies, this kind of
reengineering strategy was more a customer-focused initiative. It improved coordination of
rate of workflow as well as increased efficiency and responsiveness of supply chain thus
increasing customer satisfaction. A more keen focus on the production process rather than an
eye on the products would help in further improvement in the company becoming customer
focused.
Business process reengineering (BPR) first made its way into American management lexicon
in earnest with the publication of Hammer and Champy’s Reengineering The Corporation: A
Manifesto For Business Revolution, in 1993. However, there were other writers’ works that
preceded this publication; notable among these are the publications by James Harrington.
Although lack of standardization is not limited to reengineering, this management concept
seems to take this problem to new heights as evidenced by prevalent inconsistencies even in
the writings of the same authors. Regardless of how the various theorists and practitioners
define reengineering, it seeks to take advantage of advances in technology to address the goal
of cost cutting in organizations. Too often business managers’ implementations of BPR have
seemed to legitimize labor reductions. Somehow, quality improvement focus was lost in the
shuffle. The premise here is that BPR’s historical conceptualization and implementation has
many pitfalls. These pitfalls are elaborated upon in this article, and an alternative view is
presented as to how BPR should be conceptualized and implemented. This new approach
integrates BPR into Total Quality Management (TQM); it also preserves workers’ moral.
Merging BPR into TQM shines a much needed positive light on BPR and strengthens the
value continuous improvement doctrine in TQM. The “drastic” and “revolutionary”
principles advocated by Hammer and Champy have caused unnecessary dislocations in
businesses that implemented it as a separate business practice from TQM. The fundamental
issue is the crystallization of what BPR really is. How should we view it? Is it a management
strategy or is it a tool by which higher level management strategies such as TQM could be
executed? We present an alternative conceptualization of business process reengineering.
Therefore, this paper enhances not only engineering knowledge, but the business of
engineering knowledge.

What is House of Quality? Explain with detail the construction of a house of quality?

House of Quality can be defined as the most convenient, easy, and simple tool used to
convert the customer needs into technical descriptors for the firm. House of Quality is
actually a matrix and is also termed as Quality Matrix.
The matrix gives us details such as customer requirements, technical descriptors, priority
levels of the various descriptors, the relationship between the descriptors and target values for
each descriptor amongst others. house of quality also shows competitive evaluation between
various other products with the current product in the market.

The ceiling of the house gives the various technical descriptors to the management of
the company. The technical descriptors of the product are provided through the various
engineering design constraints, requirements, and various other parameters. The roof of the
house explains the inter-relationship between the various technical descriptors available.
On the left side wall we have the list of customer requirements and on the right side wall, we
have the prioritized customer requirement that reflects the importance of the various needs of
the customer. house of quality shows competitive benchmarking and the importance of
customer rating. The interior of the house gives inter-relationship between the voice of the
customer and the technical descriptors of the product and business operations.

The base or foundation of the house gives the list of the prioritized technical descriptors.
house of quality also showcases factors such as technical benchmarking, target values, and
the importance of technical descriptors.

The focus in House of Quality is the correlation between the identified customer needs,
termed as the Whats, and the engineering characteristics are termed as the House. House of
Quality is a kind of conceptual map that provides all details required for inter-
functional planning and communication in the organization.

Advantages of House of Qualities

 Reduces the time required for the planning process

 Focuses completely on customer needs and requirements
 Reduces design changes and alterations
 Improved house of quality of the products
 High customer satisfaction
 Decreased design and manufacture costs and overheads
 Reduces time to market the product
 Helps in prioritizing various design parameters
 Aids in benchmarking the processes

Steps in House of Qualities

1. Identify what are the exact needs and demands of the customer in the target market.
2. Identify how the product will satisfy the targeted customer. house of quality refers to
identifying specific product characteristics, features or attributes that the customer is
looking for and showing how to satisfy customer’s needs and wants
 3. Identify relationships between How’s and What. A couple of questions, those are to be
answered here: How do our how’s tie together? What is the relationship between our
two or more how’s in the entire process?
4. Develop the importance of ratings as house of quality refers to using the customer’s
importance ratings and weights from the relationships in the matrix to compute the
important ratings.
5. Evaluate competing products or services as the main question to be answered here is:
How well do the competing products in the market meet customer wants? This activity
is completely based on thorough market research.
6. Determine the desirable technical attributes as in this step, our performance and the
competitor’s performance are determined and compared in an effective manner to
arrive at a conclusion.

Elaborate on the 7 basic steps of strategic quality management.

SEVEN STEPS TO STRATEGIC QUALITY PLANNING

In order to integrate quality with the strategic planning process, a systematic and sequential
procedure has to be adopted. There are seven basic steps to strategic process planning. They
are

Step 1. Customer Needs

The basic step is the identification of customers and their wants and needs. An
organization must seek its customers’ requirements, expectations and assess future trends
before developing a
strategic plan

Step 2. Customer Position

The second step requires the planners to determine its positioning with regards to its
customers. Various alternatives such as whether the organization should give up, maintain or
expand market position should be considered. In order to become successful, the organization
should concentrate and consolidate its position in its areas of excellence.

Step 3. Predict the Future

Next, the planners must predict future conditions that will affect their product or
service: To help predicting the future, the tools such as demographics, economic forecasts,
and technical assessments or projections may be used.

Step 4. Gap Analysis

In this step, the planners must identify the gaps between the current state and the future state
of the organization. This concept is also known as value stream mapping. For identifying the
gaps, an analysis of the core values and concepts and other techniques may be used.
Step 5. Closing the Gaps
 Now the planners should develop a specific plan to close the gaps. This process is also
termed as Process improvement. By assessing the relative importance and relative difficulty
of each gap, planners can close the gaps.

Step 6. Alignment

Now the revised plan should be aligned with the mission, vision, and core values and
concepts of the organization. Organization should embrace quality as an essential ingredient
in their vision, mission, and objectives.
Step 7. Implementation

In order to implement the action plan, resources must be allocated to collecting data,
designing changes, and overcoming resistance to change. Also the planners should monitor
and assess the result of the strategic plan.

Since quality is a continuous improvement process, one has to reassess and

renew the strategic plans periodically. So it is a cyclic process. Figure summarizes the
strategic planning cycle.

Case study: Compulsory

Doordarshan:
DD is the India’s premier public service broadcaster with more than 1,000 transmitters
covering 90% of the country’s population across on estimated 70 million homes .It has more
than 20,000 employees managing its metro and regional channels. Recent years have seen
growing competition from many private channels numbering more than 65,and the cable and
satellite operators (C and S).The C and S network reaches nearly 30 million homes and is
growing at a very fast rate .DD’s business model is based on selling half – hour slots of
commercial time to the programme procedure and charging them a minimum guarantee. For
instance, the present tariff for the first 20 episodes of a programme Rs.30 lakhs plus the cost
of production of the programme. In exchange the procedures get 780 seconds of commercial
time that he can sell to advertisers and Can generate revenue. Break-even point for
procedures , at the present rates ,thus is Rs.75,000 for a 10 second advertising spot . Beyond
20 episodes , the minimum guarantee is Rs. 65 lakhs for which the procedures has to charge
Rs 1,15,000 for a 10 seconds spot in order to Break-even. It is at this point the advertisers
face a problem – the competitive rates for a 10 second spot is Rs. 50,000.Procedures are
possessive about buying commercial time on DD.As a result the DD’s projected growth of
revenue is only commercial time on DD.As a result the DD’s projected growth of revenue is
only 6-10% as against 50-60% for the private sector channel. Software suppliers, advertisers
and audiences’ are deserting DD owing to its unrealistic pricing policy . DD has options
before it. First, it should privates , second it should remain purely public service broadcaster
and third, a middle path. The challenge seems to be exploit DD’s immense potential and
emerge as a formidable player in the mass media.

1. Suggest and implement TQMS practices

A. Kaizen
B. Quality Circles
C. 80-20 Rule Preto principal