Total Quality Mangement Essay Example for Free

Total Quality Mangement Essay What is Total Quality Management (TQM)? TQM is a management strategy that attempts to maximize the competitiveness of a organization through continual improvement of quality in its products and services. The ultimate goal is to increase customer satisfaction. They premise in this method is that everyone involved is the responsibility of everyone involved in the process; this includes management, workforce, suppliers and even customers. [ (Wikipedia, 2012) ] We will examine two test cases and examine how TQM can help them improve. We will examine their failures and examine how TQM would help them overcome them. In the book â€Å"Out of the Crisis†, by Dr Deming he points out fourteen points that manager must use in order to follow a successful TQM strategy. They are: 1) Create constancy of purpose for improvement of product and service. Management must change from a preoccupation with the short run to building for the long run. This requires dedication to innovation in all areas to best meet the needs of citizens or clients. 2) Adopt the new philosophy. Americans have been too tolerant to poor performance and sullen service. We need a new philosophy in which mistakes and negativism is unacceptable. 3) Cease dependence on mass inspection. Inspection is equivalent to planning for defects; it comes too late, and it is ineffective and costly. Instead, processes must be improved. 4) End the practice of awarding contracts on the basis of price tag. Purchasing departments customarily operate on orders to seek the lowest-priced vendor. Frequently, this leads to supplies or services of low quality. Instead, they should seek the best quality and work to achieve it with a single supplier for any one item in a long-term relationship. 5) Improve constantly and forever the system of operations and service. Improvement is not a one-time effort. Management and employees are obligated to continually look for ways to reduce waste and improve quality. 6) Institute modern methods of training on the job. Too often, employees learn their jobs from other employees who were never trained properly. They are forced to follow unintelligible instructions. They cannot do their jobs because no one tells them how. ) Institute modern methods of leadership. Lower-level managers must be empowered to inform upper management about conditions that need correction; once informed, management must take action. Barriers (such as reserved parking places for top management) that prevent employees from doing their jobs with pride must be removed. 8) Drive out fear. Many employees are afraid to ask questions or t o take a position, even when they do not understand what the job is or what is right or wrong. People will continue to do things the wrong way or to not do them at all. The economic loss from fear is appalling. It is necessary for better quality and productivity that people feel secure. 9) Break down barriers between staff areas. Often staff areas, departments, units, and so on are competing with each other or have goals that conflict. They do not work as a team so they can solve or foresee problems. Worse, one departments goals may cause trouble for another. Each discipline must stop optimizing its own work and instead work together as a team for the company as a whole. Multidisciplinary quality control circles can help improve design, service, quality and costs. 0) Eliminate slogans, exhortations, numerical goals and targets for the work force. These never helped anybody do a good job. Let people put up their own slogans. Although workers should not be given numerical goals, the organization itself must have a goal: never ending improvement. 11) Eliminate work standards and quotas. Quotas focus on quantity not quality. They are usually a guarantee of inefficiency and high cost. To hold a job, a person meets quotas at any cost, without regard to damage to the organization. 12) Remove barriers to pride of workmanship. People are eager to do a good job and distressed when they cannot. Too often, misguided managers, faulty equipment, and defective material stand in the way. These barriers must be removed. 13) Institute a vigorous program of education and training. Because quality and productivity improvements change the number of people needed in some areas and the jobs required, people must be continually trained and retrained. All training must include basic statistical techniques. 14) Create a structure in top management that will push every day on the above 13 points. (Demings, 2000) The Nightmare on Telecom Street In our first test case James Harrington attempts to make a flight reservation by calling a major airline. His experience is an excellent example of a company trying to be so efficient that they alienate their customers. Efficiency is very important to a company, but not at the cost of losing customers. The service failures started even before the phone was answered; the phone rang five times before the auto attendant answered. From there the customer was given an endless amount of choices to get routed to the right department. Once there she was on hold before a live person finally answered the phone. This person asked the caller for the same information they just provided to the auto attendant. Once the caller was verified, the person tells them they have reached the wrong department and gives them another phone number to call so they can start the process all over again. In order for this airline to solve their service failures they need to think of their customers. It is okay to have an auto attendant to direct traffic in the right direction, but maybe only one or two choices before reaching a live person. They also need to give the option of pressing zero and speaking to an operator that would forward the call to the right department. The airline must realize that people like to speak with people, not computers. The phone call is the first impression that the potential client will have of the airline. They need to make this phone call as enjoyable as possible so they will not hang up and call a competitor. The State University Experience The second case study is about a student that is very excited to go to a certain State University and his enthusiasm is diminished by the universities actions. This case is another example where there the customer is an afterthought. In this case it is obvious that there was no thought given to the customer experience. There were difficulties starting with the campus tour and throughout the entire enrollment process. The service failures started the school tour. It is obvious that the university just paid any student to take potential enrollees on a tour of the school; they did not provide them any formal training on what to say or design a specific tour of the school that highlights the schools best features. They did not even make sure that the lights in all the buildings on the tour were on during the tour. It only went downhill from there. The enrollment process was painful, the student kept having to send in the same documentation; the university kept losing stuff. The student sent in everything requested several times and they still ended up enrolling him into the wrong program. A total disaster! This case study is an example of a program that has to be revamped from the beginning. They need to start with meeting and exceeding customer satisfaction. If the tour is going to be in the middle of the summer, they need to make sure that the tour does not spend too much time outside; you need to make sure that people are comfortable. The tour guide needs to go through training on the message the university wants potential students to hear. Finally, the enrollment process has to be more efficient. They need to use technology to make their enrollment process smoother. He should not have to send in the same documents more than once. Conclusion In both test cases you see examples of potential clients being really let down. In today’s competitive environment firms have to make sure that potential clients have a good overall experience. In does not take many unhappy clients to post on their facebook page before you have a nightmare. I believe companies can use the 14 points to improve their TQM and improve their customer experience. Works Cited Demings, W. E. (2000). Out of the Crisis. The MIT Press. Wikipedia. (2012, 3 4). Total quality management. Retrieved 2012, from Wikipedia: http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Total_quality_management

Legitimizing Final Causes :: essays research papers

<a href="http://www.geocities.com/vaksam/">Sam Vaknin's Psychology, Philosophy, Economics and Foreign Affairs Web Sites The word "telos" in ancient Greek meant: "goal, target, mission, completion, perfection". The Greeks seem to have associated the attaining of a goal with perfection. Modern scientific thought is much less sanguine about teleology, the belief that causes are preceded by their effects. The idea is less zany than it sounds. It was Aristotle who postulated the existence of four types of causes. It all started with the attempt to differentiate explanatory theories from theories concerning the nature of explanation (and the nature of explanatory theories). To explain is to provoke an understanding in a listener as to why and how something is as it is. Thales, Empedocles and Anaxagoras were mostly concerned with offering explanations to natural phenomena. The very idea that there must be an explanation is revolutionary. We are so used to it that we fail to see its extraordinary nature. Why not assume that everything is precisely as it is because this is how it should be, or because there is no better way (Leibnitz), or because someone designed it this way (religious thought)? Plato carried this revolution further by seeking not only to explain things - but also to construct a systematic, connective epistemology. His Forms and Ideas are (not so primitive) attempts to elucidate the mechanism which we employ to cope with the world of things, on the one hand, and the vessels throu gh which the world impresses itself upon us, on the other hand. Aristotle made this distinction explicit: he said that there is a difference between the chains of causes of effects (what leads to what by way of causation) and the enquiry regarding the very nature of causation and causality. In this text, we will use the word causation in the sense of: "the action of causes that brings on their effects" and causality as: "the relation between causes and their effects". Studying this subtle distinction, Aristotle came across his "four causes". All, according to him, could be employed in explaining the world of natural phenomena. This is his point of departure from modern science. Current science does not admit the possibility of a final cause in action. But, first things first. The formal cause is why a thing is the type of thing that it is. The material cause is the matter in which the formal reason is impressed.

Immanuel Kant Essay

Deontological ethics are concerned with what people do and not with the consequences of their actions. It teaches some actions might be correct or wrong because of their nature, and it is the duty of the people to act accordingly, regardless of the consequences that might occur, for the good or bad. It basically means one has to adhere to the universal rules and guidelines irrespective of the consequences and act in accordance to them. Getting to the means is not important by the way or choice of getting to the mean is important. Immanuel Kant, the man who formulated this theory had a method to practice this theory and this was known as the maxims. Before testing the decisions of the product manager with the three maxims, let’s look at the decision from a business and not an ethical point of view. The product manager has chosen the Thai company and it benefits his company financially as his costs go down by 1/3 rd the price, thus making sense from a business point of view. There is another way of looking at this situation, it could be said that this decision of the product manager is providing those families with work and giving them a chance to make some money and earn a livelihood and provide for themselves. Also the decision makes sense on a personal level as he stands to earn a hefty bonus at the end of the year. In spite of the decision making financial and business sense, on his way back the product manager had an ethical dilemma as the decision questioned his morality as the situation involved inhumanity and child labour, leading him to think is this the right decision? Testing the decision against the three maxims, I will decide whether the decision taken by the product manager is ethical or not. Considering the three maxims a lot of valid points can be argued for and against the decision of the product manager. Maxim 1: The first maxim states that â€Å"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law without contradiction†. The decision contradicts the universal law as the product manager does not want to see his nieces in the same situation as the kids making the toys. He wonders about his nieces and whether he would like to see them grow up as the kids making the toys. He wants his nieces to have a good life with education, shelter and all basic necessities. According to maxim 1, even the children making the toys should have the same privileges. As a result this decision by the product manager fails maxim 1 and although it makes financial sense, ethically it will not be right and according to the universal law the decision does not support deontology theory as the product manager is not at ease with himself in the same situation. As a result according to maxim 1 it will be a non-ethical decision. BAFD2 1321A PAGE 2 Ethics in Business Studies Maxim 2: The second maxim states that â€Å"Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end but always at the same time as an end†. This means one should treat another person as one would like to be in the treated himself. The product manager would definitely not want to be in the same situation as the family making the toys, where young children who are supposed to go to school and have a normal childhood sitting all day and making toys and an old lady preparing meals for everybody as the family lives in sub-standard conditions. He would not want his nieces in that similar situation or his family living in similar circumstances. This cannot be considered humanitarian and as a result the decision of the product manager fails the second maxim of deontology and cannot be considered to be an ethical decision. Maxim 3: The third maxim states â€Å"Therefore, every rational being must so act as if he were through his maxim always a legislating member in the universal kingdom of ends. † This maxim does rationalise the decision of the product manager. These families that make the toys depend on this for their livelihood and need it for their survival. So if the product manager declines the offer some other company might take it up and the families will continue to work and live in the same situation. If the product manager declines the contract he may be depriving the families of their income. On the other hand by accepting the contract he is supporting child labour and inhuman working conditions. This makes him wonder and he would not want to see his family in a situation where he is sitting in a barn with his nieces working and his mother cooking a meal. The children that should be at school are forced to work and elderly women are forced to work too. Seeing his family in a similar situation would want to make him decline the contract on ethical grounds. However with regards to the third maxim the decision to choose the Thai company does not pass the test but neither does it fail the maxim test. The decision to decline may not be warranted as some other company might take up the contract but on a rational and ethical ground declining the contract will be a correct decision on part of the product manager. As we have seen in this essay the decision of the product manager to choose the Thai company does not pass all three maxims and as a result it should be considered as an unethical decision. BAFD2 1321A PAGE 3 Ethics in Business Studies References: †¢Bbc. co. uk, (2014). BBC – Ethics – Introduction to ethics: Duty-based ethics. [online] Available at: http://www. bbc. co. uk/ethics/introduction/duty_1. shtml [Accessed 15 Jul. 2014]. †¢Crane, A. and Matten, D. (2010). Business ethics. 1st ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. †¢Ethics. iit. edu, (2014). Deontological | ethics. iit. edu. [online] Available at: http://ethics. iit. edu/teaching/deontological [Accessed 15 Jul. 2014]. BAFD2 1321A.

Summary Of Great Expectations Notes - 1905 Words

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