In the contemporary business practices, quality management methods and tools are widely used to enhance the productivity and quality of the organizational processes, operations, products, and services. Quality management is a comprehensive framework that works parallel to the organization involving all units, stakeholders, departments, and operations, enabling it to grow consistently. Quality assurance and quality controls are the two major complement of a quality management system that comes with quality planning and quality improvement. This paper elucidates the significance of quality assurance and quality control in the modern business arena. Considering the example of Air Mauritius, the paper elucidates about its quality assurance and quality control processes, as well as, its significance in Air Mauritius’ business.
Air Mauritius Organizational Overview & History
Air Mauritius is a Mauritius-based flagship air carrier headquartered in Port Louis at the Air Mauritius Centre. Air Mauritius is the 4th largest air carrier in Sub-Saharan Africa and it upholds a significant standing in African, Indian, and European regional market. Air Mauritius was established on June 14th, 1967 by the Mauritius Government; however, Air France holds 27.5% stake ownership. The airline is well-known for its comprehensive high-quality operations and excellent customer service. Below mentioned are the tools that are used by Air Mauritius to ensure the delivery of high quality in its daily operations and services (Air Mauritius, 2016).
Quality Assurance & Quality Control
Quality Control and Quality Assurance is a collective term used for different measures and approaches of quality management to make sure about the specified requirements of quality. Quality assurance is the ability of the company or organization to meet the desired level of quality. Quality assurance applies to the provision of products and services, such as consumer goods, manufactured goods, industrial projects, services, or software. The quality assurance is the autonomous development of an organization in the foreground (Kim, 2012). So there are no external requirements but the organization has to decide that which areas they want to go towards and with what resources. Quality assurance is mainly used in organizations to quickly restructure the growing knowledge and process areas to upgrade quality to optimum level. The quality assurance serves primarily as an indispensable tool for the creation of efficiency and transparency (Kinnison & Siddiqui, 2012).
Quality Assurance & Quality Control in Air Mauritius
Air Mauritius see quality assurance and quality control as a part of its functional management with the purpose of the effectiveness and efficiency of its business processes. Its major quality assurance and quality control contents involves the optimization of its communication structures, proficient solution, and strategies that increase or maintain client satisfaction, as well as, the workforce motivation, standardization of work processes and business, standards for services and products, vocational training, documentation, facilities and design of workrooms. While designing workflows in organizations, Air Mauritius ensure that quality issues occupy the allotted space. The organization also ensures that when it considers quality, it undertakes its internal organizational processes while defining them as the degree to which the process or services meets the considered requirements (Kinnison & Siddiqui, 2012).
Implementation of Quality Assurance & Quality Control in Air Mauritius
In Air Mauritius, Quality assurance and quality control is applied during all its flight operations process by using methods that could save time and money (e.g. knowledge of efficient statistical, probabilistic flight operations and production models). The air carrier keeps on adopting new approaches to quality assurance and treats the potential problems that drastically change the way it manages its achieved level of quality. The new approaches implemented by Air Mauritius includes;
100% automatic quality assurance and quality control system in the production process and flight operation instead of manual samples.
Sensors in real time to achieve quality assurance and quality control during or after the processes according to the defined quality standards (Goetsch & Davis, 2014).
Immediate feedback on the processes, which can be placed on variables which determine the quality of the output, rather than a macro vision of the process.
Installations of programs that monitor the main data in the operations and process.
Control and assurance technologies combined with advanced software to achieve optimization majority control of the airline operations (Wu & Cheng, 2013, p.13).
Significance of Quality Assurance & Quality Control in Air Mauritius
Quality control and quality assurance systems in Air Mauritius allow the organization an inclusive opportunity to improve the process and service quality. Air Mauritius maintains the quality that is relative to its customer requirements and also to its internal and external stakeholders while also considering the existing and impending business risks. The quality assurance and quality control systems of Air Mauritius ensure the optimal level of quality while making it certain that the processes do not produce inadequate additional costs. Air Mauritius’business is so powerful as it has implemented the triptych ‘cost - time - quality’ approach that makes its resources efficient allowing the organization to place itself in a market relishing a higher margin ahead of its competition due to its quality services (Guiffrida & Messina, 2015).
The quality assurance and quality control systems at Air Mauritius are intended to provide a greater assertion that the products and services processes meet specific requirements. This is achieved through planning, implementing, and executing a code of actions to establish an adequate level of confidence, which shows that the quality was incorporated in the operations. The QA & QC at Air Mauritius is intended to ensure that quality is a constant concern in all development, maintenance, and infrastructure work / operations. To get there, QA ensures the accomplishment of an assortment of quality activities at every stage of the daily operations while designing rapid identification of faults in order to eliminate them as soon as possible. The role of QA & QC regarding the business process is to ensure that the QA & QC process are adequately implemented as per the plan, as well as, appropriate procedure for measuring quality are fair (Goetsch & Davis, 2014).
With respect to a proposed development or maintenance of operations, Air Mauritius follows a quality plan, which defines all the means and resources that will be used to ensure that the QA & QC systems will meet the expectations and requirements of customers i.e. they will be of the highest quality possible within the constraints of budget and schedule. Air Mauritius first verifies that its quality targets are clearly defined, understood, and communicated to all stakeholders. The complexity criteria of the quality plan vary for each operation (Kim, 2012, pp.295).
In Air Mauritius’ quality assurance and control framework, activities and tasks are presented specific to quality along with their resource and costs requirements, as well as, their inclusive management objectives followed by a timetable. The QA & QC systems include the quality plan of configuration management. The quality plan also ascertains the standards, documents, conventions, and practices that govern the operations and processes while also finding out that how they will be monitored and audited to certify the compliance and adequacy. These QA & QC systems also identify measures, technical, statistics, procedures for the identification of problems, corrections, resources for example methodologies, techniques, tools and security for training, documentation, quality reports and physical media (Guiffrida & Messina, 2015).
The above discussion concludes that quality control and quality assurance has become a significant part of contemporary business practices. Organizations like Air Mauritius has achieved a greater level of quality and customer appreciation by undertaking a comprehensive quality management system, which ensures that each of its processes and operations are aligned with the defined quality criteria of industry or the relative area. Therefore, it can be concluded that quality management systems have become a vital pillar of business operation these days, without which, the customer loyalty and industry competitiveness seems to be unachievable.
References
Air Mauritius. (2016). Official Website. Retrieved From http://www.airmauritius.com/ on March 29, 2016
Goetsch, D.L. and Davis, S.B., 2014. Quality management for organizational excellence. Pearson. Retrieved From http://abufara.com/abufara.net/images/abook_file/back/Ch1.pdf on March 29, 2016
Guiffrida, A.L. and Messina, M.J., 2015. Quality Control Techniques in Services Marketing. In Proceedings of the 1988 International Conference of Services Marketing (pp. 223-234). Springer International Publishing. Retrieved From http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-17317-7_20 on March 29, 2016
Kim, D.Y., Kumar, V. and Kumar, U., 2012. Relationship between quality management practices and innovation. Journal of Operations Management, 30(4), pp.295-315. Retrieved From http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272696312000174 on March 29, 2016
Kinnison, H.A. and Siddiqui, T., 2012. Aviation maintenance management. Retrieved From http://trid.trb.org/view.aspx?id=1253068 on March 29, 2016
Wu, H.C. and Cheng, C.C., 2013. A hierarchical model of service quality in the airline industry.Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management, 20, pp.13-22. Retrieved From https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hung_Che_Wu/publication/259160207_A_hierarchical_model_of_service_quality_in_the_airline_industry/links/54e7439a0cf2b199060a80fe.pdf on March 29, 2016
