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Chapter 17 Quality management 515
Summary answers to key questions
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➤ What is quality and why is it so important?
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The definition of quality used in this book defines quality as ‘consistent conformance to customers’
expectations’.
➤ How can quality problems be diagnosed?
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At a broad level, quality is best modelled as the gap between customers’ expectations concerning
the product or service and their perceptions concerning the product or service.
Modelling quality this way will allow the development of a diagnostic tool which is based around
the perception–expectation gap. Such a gap may be explained by four other gaps:
– the gap between a customer’s specification and the operation’s specification;
– the gap between the product or service concept and the way the organization has specified it;
– the gap between the way quality has been specified and the actual delivered quality;
– the gap between the actual delivered quality and the way the product or service has been
described to the customer.
➤ What steps lead towards conformance to specification?
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There are six steps:
– define quality characteristics;
– decide how to measure each of the quality characteristics;
– set quality standards for each characteristic;
– control quality against these standards;
– find and correct the causes of poor quality;
– continue to make improvements.
Most quality planning and control involves sampling the operations performance in some way.
Sampling can give rise to erroneous judgements which are classed as either type I or type II
errors. Type I errors involve making corrections where none are needed. Type II errors involve
not making corrections where they are in fact needed.
➤ What is total quality management (TQM)?
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TQM is ‘an effective system for integrating the quality development, quality maintenance and
quality improvement efforts of the various groups in an organization so as to enable production
and service at the most economical levels which allow for full customer satisfaction’.
It is best thought of as a philosophy that stresses the ‘total’ of TQM and puts quality at the
heart of everything that is done by an operation.
‘Total’ in TQM means the following:
– meeting the needs and expectations of customers;
– covering all parts of the organization;
– including every person in the organization;
– examining all costs which are related to quality, and getting things ‘right first time’;
– developing the systems and procedures which support quality and improvement;
– developing a continuous process of improvement.