Quality Management Essentials

David Hoyle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781136370281
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

From the best-selling quality management author, David Hoyle, Quality Management Essentials is the perfect brief, yet authoritative, introduction to the fundamentals of quality management. Quality in organizations, large or small, is achieved with intelligent use of various concepts, principles, tools and techniques. For those coming to the subject for the first time, these philosophies associated with quality management can be quite overwhelming. This very readable book provides a fast track introduction and executive level appraisal of the field from a respected and experienced author.

1 Introduction to quality

DOI: 10.4324/9780080471396-1

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

Confucius (551 479 BCE) Chinese philosopher

Principles or prescription

One of the great problems in our age is to impart understanding in the minds of those who have the ability and opportunity to make decisions that affect our lives. There is no shortage of information – in fact there is too much now we can search a world of information from the comfort of our armchair. We are bombarded with information but it is not knowledge – it does not necessarily lead to understanding. With so many conflicting messages from so many people, it is difficult to determine the right thing to do. There are those whose only need is a set of principles from which they are able to determine the right things to do. There are countless others who need a set of rules derived from principles that they can apply to what they do and indeed others who need a detailed prescription derived from the rules for a particular task. In the translation from principles to prescription, inconsistencies arise. Those translating the principles into rules or requirements are often not the same as those translating the rules into a detailed prescription. Rules are often an imperfect translation of principles and yet, they are enforced without regard to or even an understanding of the principles they were intended to implement. This is no more prevalent than in local government where officials behave like robots, enforcing rules without regard to what the rules were intended to achieve.

The principles in the field of quality management have not arisen out of academia but from life in the work place. Observations from the work place have been taken into academia, analysed, synthesized and refined to emerge as universal principles. These principles have been expressed in many ways and in their constant refreshment the language is modernized and simplified, but the essence is hardly changed.

Without a set of principles, achieving a common understanding in the field of quality management would be impossible. Since Juran, Deming and Feigenbaum wrote about quality management in the 1950s there has been considerable energy put into codifying the field of quality management and a set of principles from which we can derive useful rules, regulations and requirements has emerged. This chapter addresses these principles in a way that is intended to impart understanding not only in the minds of those who prefer principles to prescription, but also in the minds of those who prefer prescriptions. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with wanting a prescription. It saves time, it's repeatable, it's economic and it's the fastest way to get things done but it has to be right. The receivers of prescriptions need enough understanding to know whether what they are being asked to do is appropriate to the circumstances they are facing.

The concepts expressed in this book embody universal principles and have been selected and structured in a manner that is considered suitable for those wishing to get some clarity in a field of knowledge that often appears contradictory. It is not intended as a comprehensive guide to quality management – some further reading is given in the Bibliography. ISO 9000:2000 also contains concepts some of which are questionable but these will be dealt with as they arise. The aim is to give the reader a balanced view and present a logical argument that is hoped will lead to greater understanding. As the book is supposed to be about the management of quality, there is no better place to start than with an explanation of the word quality.

Needs, requirements and expectations

Organizations are created to achieve a goal, mission or objective but they will only do so if they satisfy the needs, requirements and expectations of their stakeholders. Their customers, as one of the stakeholders, will be satisfied only if they provide products and services that meet their needs, requirements and expectations. Their other stakeholders (shareholders, employees, suppliers and society) will only be satisfied if the products and services provided to customers are produced and supplied in a manner that satisfies their needs, requirements and expectations – in other words, it makes a profit, does no unintentional harm, and is conceived and produced with due regard to prevailing legislation.

We all have needs, wants, requirements and expectations. Needs are essential for life, to maintain certain standards, or essential for products and services, to fulfil the purpose for which they have been acquired. According to Maslow,¹ man is a wanting being; there is always some need he wants to satisfy. Once this is accomplished, that particular need no longer motivates him and he turns to another, again seeking satisfaction. Everyone has basic physiological needs that are necessary to sustain life. (Food, water, clothing, and shelter). Maslow's research showed that once the physiological needs are fulfilled, the need for safety emerges. After safety come social needs followed by the need for esteem and finally the need for self-actualization or the need to realize ones full potential. Satisfaction of physiological needs is usually associated with money – not money itself but what it can buy. The hierarchy of needs is shown in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 Hierarchy of needs

These needs are fulfilled by the individual purchasing, renting or leasing products or services. Corporate needs are not too dissimilar. The physiological needs of organizations are those necessary to sustain survival. Often profit comes first because no organization can sustain a loss for too long but functionality is paramount – the product or service must do the job for which it is intended regardless of it being obtained cheaply. Corporate safety comes next in terms of the safety of employees and the safety and security of assets followed by social needs in the form of a concern for the environment and the community as well as forming links with other organizations and developing contacts. Esteem is represented in the corporate context by organizations purchasing luxury cars, winning awards, superior offices and infrastructures and possessing those things that give it power in the market place and government. Self-actualization is represented by an organization's preoccupation with growth, becoming bigger rather than better, seeking challenges and taking risks. However, it is not the specific product or service that is needed but the benefits that possession brings that is important. This concept of benefits is the most important and key to the achievement of quality.

Requirements are what we request of others and may encompass our needs but often we don't fully realize what we need until after we have made our request. For example, now that we own a mobile telephone we discover we really need hands-free operation when using the phone while driving a vehicle. Our requirements at the moment of sale may or may not therefore express all our needs. By focusing on benefits resulting from products and services, needs can be converted into wants such that a need for food may be converted into a want for a particular brand of chocolate. Sometimes the want is not essential but the higher up the hierarchy of needs we go, the more a want becomes essential to maintain our social standing, esteem or to realize our personal goals. Our requirements may therefore include such wants – what we would like to have but are not essential for survival.

In growing their business organizations create a demand for their products and services but far from the demand arising from a want that is essential to maintain our social standing, it is based on an image created for us by media advertising. We don't need spring vegetables in the winter but because industry has created the organization to supply them, a demand is created that becomes an expectation. Spring vegetables have been available in the winter now for so long that we expect them to be available in the shops and will go elsewhere if they are not. But they are not essential to survival, to safety, to esteem or to realize our potential and their consumption may in fact harm our health because we are no longer absorbing the right chemicals to help us survive the cold winters. We might want it, even need it but it does us harm and regrettably, there are plenty of organizations ready to supply us products that will harm us.

Expectations are implied needs or requirements. They have not been requested because we take them for granted – we regard them to be understood within our particular society as the accepted norm. They may be things to which we are accustomed, based on fashion, style, trends or previous experience. One therefore expects sales staff to be polite and courteous, electronic products to be safe and reliable, policemen to be honest, coffee to be hot, etc. One would like politicians to be honest but in some countries we have come to expect them to be corruptible, dishonest or at least, economical with the truth! As expectations are also born out of experience, some people might expect businessmen to be corruptible and selfish and it comes as no surprise to read about long drawn out court cases involving fraud and deceit. Likewise, after frequent poor service from a train operator, our expectations are that the next time we use that train operator; we will once again be disappointed. We would therefore be delighted if, through some well focused quality initiative, the train operator exceeded our expectations on our next journey.

Expectations

It is easy to exceed customer expectations when your usual performance is well below the norm

The stakeholders

Organizations depend on customers because without them there is no business. However, in order to satisfy these customers, organizations also depend on a number of other parties that provide them with resources and sanction their operations. There are parties other than the customer that have an interest or stake in the organization and what it does but may not receive a product. The term quality is not defined relative to customers but to requirements and these interested parties do have requirements. ISO 9000:2000 defines an interested party as a person or group having an interest in the performance or success of an organization. But, the organization may not have an interest in all of them and on reflection perhaps the word interest is not quite appropriate. Consider for instance, competitors, criminals and terrorists. None of these has put anything into the organization and their interest is more likely to be malevolent than benevolent so in these cases the organization fights off their interests rather than satisfies them. A better word to interest would be stake but in some cultures this translates as a bet that you place on a horse to win a race. However, it is common in the west for the term stakeholder to be used in preference to the term interested party, as it implies benevolence unlike the term interested parties which might be benevolent or malevolent.

Interested party

A person or group having an interest in the performance or success of an organization – primarily includes:

Customers, shareholders, employees, suppliers, an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction to quality
• 2 Achieving sustaining and improving quality
• 3 A systems approach
• 4 Managing quality using ISO 9000
• 5 How ISO 9000 made us think about quality
• 6 Managing quality using the process approach
• 7 Making the case for managing quality more effectively
• Appendix A Food for thought
• Appendix B Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index