- Establishing customer expectations
This is the steps used to find out customer feelings, perception, and attitude towards the organization. (Schroeder, 2012). The first step is to look and be able to observe what a customer who is visiting your organization for the first time would see. Second step is listening and being able to identify what the customer wants without interrupting them while talking. Importance of doing this is to be able to meet customer satisfaction since goods produce will be able to match the expectation. The common risk is that organizations become very rigid delivering service delivery.
/>
- Designing quality
Designing quality is the ways in which quality of the product and services matched with customer expectations. In the contemporary market, customers link quality with the value of their consideration (Garvin, 2010). This effort emphasizes so much on non-financial measurements. Proper designed quality of any product or service is very important as it helps reduce waste and reduce the amount of assets needed to support operations of a firm. The common risk of this strategy is that most managers who use it tend to ignore processes used to give the result at the expense of the final product. This may be misleading resulting to overhead cost (Garvin, 2010).
- Defining metrics
Quality metrics is the tool that helps an organization to translate the customer needs and wants into goals that can be measured (Garvin, 2010). It is very important as goals of the customer can be assessed and ensure efficiency in production which also help in reducing cost of production. The risk in this tool is complexity in getting the measurable goals. Failure to measure this needs accurately and be able to report a clearly controlled metrics can be very dangerous to the business.
- Mistake proofing
This is the search and use of any method that ensures that no error occurs and known when it occurs (Schroeder, 2012). It involves the creation of flowcharts, of the operation process. Every error made traceable help in identifying the source. According to Schroeder (2012), elimination, replacement, and facilitating method reduce error reoccurrence. The tool is important as it reduces the chances of producing defective product and services. Inaccurate measurement makes the tool risky.
- Kaizen
Kaizen is continuous improvement of every person in an organization from top to bottom management (Schroeder, 2012). Improvement talked of in Kaizen is improving the state of existing situations. Valuable resource to the production process left while others are waste and dropped. Kaizen as a tool is important as it eliminates all possible waste that would increase the cost of production. It increases profitability of the firm both financially and by goodwill (Schroeder, 2012). This strategy is risky in that it insignificantly changes the status quo this may lead to factors being obsolete.
- Six Sigma
According to Schroeder (2012), Six Sigma is a strategy that aims at improving operations of an organization, designing the best methods to achieve the set goals, and being in a position to monitor all the processes needed to eliminate possible wastes at the same time meeting the satisfaction by increasing stability of the business finances. Both the conditions before improvement process and the after improvement process is properly compared to find the capability in both (Schroeder, 2012). The risk is that the reliability of the strategy depends so much on the validity of the measurements of the performance. The result will be wrong when the measurements used are no accurate.
References
Garvin, D. A. (2010). Managing Quality. New York: The Free Press.
Schroeder, S. A. (2012) A Strategy for Quality Assurance. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
