Suggested improvements to the initial system
A quality management system is a set of standards and requirements that should be followed in order to have quality products and services. It has various components that will have to meet. It has responsibilities of the staff, structures and processes that should be followed. The most important factor that should be taken into consideration is to have the quality standards integrated with the culture in the organization. The organization standards should not come up with a totally new concept. This will require that the culture that has been followed should be adopted in the quality model that the organization is embracing. This paper will focus on the improvement that is required in the model that was suggested before (Peratec Ltd., 2004).
In the model that was developed before, the most important factors are the customer perspective, service realization, feedback, resource, management responsibility and measurement analysis. These are depicted in the diagram (Ross, & Perry, 1999).
One of the improvements that should be integrated to the system that was suggested is to determine what the client wants. It is important to get to know what the client wants. In the model that I suggested, there is no way in which the requirements of the customers are determined. There is a way in which this can be determined. There is a need to determine this and get the requirements of the customer. There is a need to ensure that there is an effective communication that exists between the customers and the organization; the stated communication should be continuous. There should also be an engagement of the customers in designing a product or service. An organization should develop a strong relationship between the two parties (customer and organization) to ensure that customers participate actively in any marketing activity. Through this, there is a need for a database to be put in place so that customers can be easily monitored on their needs and requirements.
There is also a need to have continuous improvement of the standard that has been attained. Traditional systems did not focus on improvement once a company attained a certain level of quality standards. The improvement that is suggested advocates for gradual improvement of quality in the organization; the major improvements in quality in an organization are realized through gradual changes and improvement. Continuous improvement requires the organization or company to continually strive to be better through gradual learning and problem solving. Perfection may not be achieved but continuous evaluation of performance and improvement always improve the quality of products and services (Samual, 2004).
There is also a need to ensure the services and products have been designed in a way that meets the set standards. In the model suggested, the management of services has been taken care of but that of managing products has not been mentioned. Ensuring product and service design to meet customer satisfaction is a critical aspect of building quality. Handling the customer perspective of a product or service is a difficult task since different customers have different taste and preference. To meet the customer satisfaction these different tastes and preferences have to be effectively translated into the design of the products and services. This translation is done by use of quality function deployment; this also enhances communication between different functions such as marketing, engineering and operations (Pekar, 2005).
There is also a need to have a way to improve the processes that are found in the organization. In any quality management aspect, quality comes as a result of managing a process. In quality management system, a quality product or service will always come as a result of a quality process. This means that quality should be embedded in the process. According to the philosophy, it is more important to uncover problems at the source and solve them rather than discarding defective products and services after production. This is because of the reasonable fact that if the problem is not identified and corrected a source, the problem will continue (Kanji, 2005).
The notion of quality at source brings out the difference between the old concepts of quality and the new concepts. The old concept emphasized on the inspection of the final product and service after production or at regular stage intervals, this would result in the discarding of defective products and services or sending them for reworking, this would mean extra cost and loss of time. These costs are always passed to the consumer thus demeaning the essence of customer satisfaction. On the other hand the new concept focuses on the identification of the quality problems at source and correcting them (Oakland, 2003).
Resultant model quality management system
Advantages of the suggested system over other quality standards
The system that I have suggested has advantages over known standards like EFQM and ISO 9001. In the design I have come up with, there is the management of the process. In other systems, process management is not covered. In ISO 9001, for example, process management is taken to be under service improvement. One thing that is not clear here is the fact that process management is a process that should be handled on its own. It is an important aspect of management and should be handled on its own. All products and services undergo a process before they are complete. Integrating process management with other aspects of quality model is not in order (Naagarazan, 2005).
Another important aspect is that management has been taken to be an independent aspect in the design I have suggested. Without proper management of the various products and services, the services and products that are being made or created will not get the standard that is being advocated. It is important that the services be managed well so that they are in the standards that were initially hoped that they would attain (Charantimath, 2003). Quality management should be undertaken in such a way that the management of the various procedures and processes is an important issue. The EFQM model, for example, talks of the leadership of the organization. This is not an important aspect per se, but rather the management of the processes and the services that are found in the organization is what matters the most. The model developed that emanates from the top level management, but those at the lower levels are there to put them into practice. They are the ones who carry out the planned activities in order to be termed a business. For a day to come to an end, an organization ensures that people are assigned duties at different areas of work to work on them but are caution to work mostly on quality. They have rather decide to attend to few customers who leave when satisfied rather that attending to many and leave when dissatisfied (Hakes, 2001).
Top level managers in any organization will have to identify both the long term and short term goals that they are addressing to in order to keep the organization moving. In connection to this, they are mainly stressing on the long term goals which are aimed at improving the quality of their services in order to woe more customers rather that stressing on short term objectives which will lack direction after a short while. The people who work in different functions any department in an organization will have to be well trained so that they can be able to attend well to the customers, and should meet the requirements of the customer, and lastly all the requested services should be available (Mukherjee, 2006).
The suggestion to have continuous improvement included in the model makes it a better model. Continuous improvement is another aspect that should be considered when undertaking quality management. This is an important procedure and should be included in the quality management issue. Management should be integrated in any aspect of quality assessment. In the model suggested, every part of the quality management system is expected to play its role well so that the end term outcome will impress the end user who is the customer thus attaining the key objective (Mukherjee, 2006).
References
Charantimath, 2003, Total Quality Management, Pearson Education India, New Delhi.
Hakes, C 2001, Total quality management: The key to business improvement : a Pera International executive briefin, Springer, New York
Kanji, GK 2005, Total quality management: proceedongs of the first world congress, Springer, New York.
Mukherjee, PN 2006, Total Quality Management, PHI Learning Pvt Ltd, New Delhi.
Naagarazan, RS 2005, Total Quality Management, New Age International, New York.
Oakland, JS 2003, Total quality management: Text with cases, Butterworth-Heinemann, New York.
Pekar, JP 2005, Total quality management: guiding principles for application, ASTM International, New York.
Peratec Ltd., 2004, Total quality management: the key to business improvement, Springer, New York.
Ross, JE, & Perry, S 1999, Total quality management: Text, cases, and reading, St. Luice Press, London.
Samual, A 2004, Total Quality Management, PHI Learning Pvt. Ltd, New Delhi.
