Category: Total Quality Management

Introduction

Total quality management (TQM) has been used as an effective strategy in multiple fields, including banking, education, medicine, and manufacturing. The automotive industry is among those that have successfully implemented TQM practices within corporations and have seen positive results from doing so. TQM stands for valuing the consumers, building a bright and sustainable future for the company, and encouraging innovation for the sake of satisfying the customers (Dahlgaard-Park et al. 1109). Such an emphasis on creating an environment where employees are constantly improving to appeal to consumer demand is beneficial for every organization that is striving for success. Moreover, individuals who see the effort companies put into giving them what they desire are more likely to be loyal to the particular corporation that engages in such practices. Total quality management has been linked to higher demand, quality, and overall outcomes.

A company that has been implementing TQM practices is KIA Motors. KIA’s history shows how a lack of quality creates a negative image for the brand, which keeps consumers from purchasing from the company. Moreover, the evidence shows that low prices are less attractive to consumers compared to reliability. KIA is a car manufacturer known for providing consumers with affordable products that usually cost less than the average automobile on the market. Consumers were interested in such cost-effective cars. Yet another issue occurred and created a negative connotation in regards to KIA cars. The problem was having a reputation of an unreliable retailer since there had been multiple complaints about the low quality. However, investing in a new design and improving quality have allowed KIA to become one of the most well-liked international brands. TQM strategies have been implemented by the top management, which was the right decision based on the current results.

Historical Background of TQM in KIA Motors

KIA Motors is a relatively old car manufacturer that has been on the market for a long time. However, due to certain policies, KIA has not been historically perceived as a reliable, top-quality car retailer. From the very beginning, KIA Motors has not been trying to appeal to a demographic that is well-off or has the means to purchase the best-quality car on the market. The initial strategy was to target an audience that values low prices over comfort, design, or even safety. This is why for the longest time, KIA was willing to focus on price reduction while disregarding other vital aspects of a car that customers may appreciate. Some of these characteristics are comfort, the interior, the exterior, the overall design of the car, and other seemingly minor concepts that have an influence on the buyer’s satisfaction. Moreover, KIA Motors has been a company that was considered unreliable because of the cheaper materials used during the manufacturing process. The corporation managed to cut down expenses. This was cost-effective, but the brand ended up suffering because of this policy.

While consumers were satisfied with the low prices, the future reparations needed for the car to function were perceived as a way for KIA to win in the short run yet lose long term. Clients had to invest in changing specific details, frequently making alterations, and spending extra resources on mechanical touch-ups. Moreover, KIA did not have comprehensive policies that would focus on consumer satisfaction. Some of the aspects that the management did not consider consist of having a target audience, a distinct branding strategy, a focus on creating a base of returning clients, etc.

South-Korean Automobile Industry

One of the reasons KIA did not invest in quality but rather focused on manufacturing cars at an affordable price was the overall industry at the time when the corporation was in the development phase. The Korean brand was targeting a particular audience within the home country because of the economic situation that did not allow individuals to invest in expensive vehicles. The Korean clientele was more likely to purchase a less pricey car, which is why the brand decided to offer a product that fits this criterion. Moreover, the overall Korean automobile industry was at the same developmental level as it is now (Thakkar and Jain). While KIA was able to compete with other local manufacturers, entering the global area has shown that foreign consumers are willing to invest in a more reliable car, even if this means spending more resources.

Both KIA Motors and Hyundai Motor have experienced the same challenging path because of the relatively low manufacturing potency of the country, the specific local demand that differs from the global one, and the focus on price without addressing quality. However, the Korean government started promoting local car manufacturers through tax cuts, an emphasis on industrialization, and an overall increasing per capita income. Such changes contributed to a higher chance of development for all the car manufacturers.

Hyundai Reforms

Evidence shows that the situation has changed due to specific organizational reforms. Firend mentions that KIA is considered the 69^th best brand due to its investments in providing customers with high-quality products and experiences (148). Specific policies have been implemented, and the result was higher customer satisfaction, which is the central concept of TQM. The process started with KIA’s initial bankruptcy, which led to Hyundai’s purchase of the corporation. While KIA Motors is independent, having a parent company has significantly contributed to its bright future.

Hyundai was also struggling as a brand, yet a significant investment into improving its cars’ quality has led to beneficial results. Hyundai representatives operate based on the notion that quality is key. The central plan is to attract customers with high manufacturing and customer service standards in comparison to the prior reliance solely on attractive prices. Historically, KIA is a brand that has not been deemed consumer-friendly and could only survive due to low prices. However, the situation started to improve as a result of a chain of events. After the parent company, Hyundai, started investing in KIA, the results were noticeable. Since then, the brand has become completely reformed in regards to design, the target audience, consumer demand, and quality. Such improvements have been beneficial for the organization and are continuing to contribute to positive results.

Organizational Results

While there is no exact information about the implementation of TQM strategies, it is certain that the management has changed particular views in the early 2000s. Consumers started noticing changes in 2006 when KIA won “Autobest” as a result of an international voting competition (KIA). Since then, TQM practices have resulted in hundreds of awards and thousands of nominations, an outcome that has benefited the brand on multiple levels. As soon as the management decided to put emphasis on quality and customer satisfaction, KIA Motors became an established corporation with strong corporate values based on clients’ demands.

It is important to mention that the brand has been successful in terms of revenue after improving its products. Researchers point out that KIA Motors has been included in the first five automobile makers as an affiliate of Hyundai (Hyun 230). Such a drastic change from a bankrupt company with a bad reputation on the market to one of the world’s top-selling car brands is evidence that total quality management practices have been positively influencing the corporation. KIA Motors is now one of the most popular automobile corporations, a result that the company’s representatives could not achieve before the structural changes.

TQM in KIA

There are multiple strategies KIA managers use that align with the principles of TQM. On the one hand, consumers enjoy driving KIA cars because of the relatively low price compared to other automobiles on the market. However, the company manages to combine affordability and quality. Specifically, the basis for such an organizational overview is the statement that quality depends on what the customer demands. Since KIA has been receiving backlash and was portrayed as an unreliable car manufacturer, the first step towards TQM was listening to feedback. It is certain that most of the commentary was negative and illustrated how low-quality cars could not fully satisfy a buyer even if the price was attractive.

As mentioned before, the first prize won for quality was the initial result of a beneficial change in management policies. KIA has never been identified as a high-quality product manufacturer, yet in 2006, voters recognized the corporation’s path towards a more efficient organizational strategy. Moreover, the top management has assumed the responsibilities of improving the quality of KIA products rather than maintaining inefficient systems that caused the organization to go bankrupt in the first place.

One of the central concepts within total quality management is making a constant effort towards product improvement. As highlighted prior, Hyundai’s investment aimed to create a new future for KIA. The goal was solely centralized into one aspect, which was improving quality. The fact that the parent company was interested in developing the brand from this perspective proves that the emphasis on TQM was a primary concern. KIA’s total quality management practices are illustrated in the approach that the management uses to operate the organization. Moreover, the awards for quality and the growing loyal consumer base are evidence that KIA representatives have been working on improving certain structural areas.

Practical Examples

KIA Motors has been using TQM strategies for the last decade, which has resulted in global recognition of the brand as an excellent car manufacturer that provides customers with quality products. There are several examples of total quality management being used by the brand in its internal and external environment. Such concepts are present in how KIA treats customers, what the brand aims to improve within the organization, and how the implemented guidelines affect manufacturing and transactions processes.

Customer Service Innovations

Appealing to the customer demand is one of the critical organizational purposes that each business follows in order for the consumers to be willing to invest in their products. KIA is among those companies that focus on providing individuals with pre and post-transaction support. The official website mentions the revolutionary 7-year warranty that is a nuance in the automobile industry since most brands cover only three years of insurance (KIA). Such a strategy is implemented due to the brand’s confidence in the products that it sells. High-quality cars rarely need additional investments, which is why KIA Motors implemented this service without fearing financial losses. Besides having a customer support team willing to assist consumers with their questions, concerns, or technical issues, the 7-year warranty is a bonus that makes the deal more appealing. Needless to say, such a rare guarantee within the automobile industry allows KIA to compete with other brands. Moreover, potential buyers are more likely to invest in a quality car that the brand is ready to insure for free.

Several other quality-related services are available for consumers to use. For example, KIA provides affordable technical services with original KIA parts. Moreover, the company is willing to prove its quality by giving a 2-year warranty for all the genuine parts installed or fixed within its service centers (KIA). Providing customers with on-demand products and services is one of the essential concepts in total quality management. KIA’s strategies illustrate that the corporation’s goal is giving consumers the best experience and the highest quality products, even when it comes to car parts and technical works.

Regulations

Every automobile company has to follow specific regulations to ensure safe practices and transparent transactions with customers. Regarding sales, KIA follows the Vehicle Sales Code, which means the corporation puts emphasis on customer safety. The code mentions the use of reliable information for advisement, security checks when the automobile is acquired by a new owner, test drives, and a provision of all the necessary documentation when a car is sold. Such procedures are designed to promote safe transactions between clients and sellers, which is an excellent way for buyers to have a safe purchase from a reliable dealer.

Staff Training

Another general concept within TQM is constantly improving the workforce through training. Employees have to be able to provide customers with the best services. KIA’s website specifically mentions taking this aspect into consideration within its organizational structure. The official page states that service training options for team members have been included since the early 2000s with the purpose of increasing customer satisfaction (KIA). For example, the corporation organizes competitions for mechanics from all over the world to promote hard work, impeccable skills, and effectiveness. According to the source, more than 25,000 employees have participated in such events in 2019 (KIA). This is an example of how the brand invests in promoting quality by teaching team members all the new business strategies aimed to satisfy consumer demand.

While such events promote productivity and proficiency within the work environment, a more effective solution is providing employees with specialized education. KIA invests in teaching full-time employees involved in departments responsible for production and service. Certain individuals who strive to contribute to organizational objectives in the long-term are provided with skills and knowledge in regards to quality control, manufacturing, customer service, etc. While this is a significant investment from a financial standpoint, such practices consolidate the latest quality trends and allow the brand to apply the strategies within its own corporation. Since TQM is based on continuous improvement and training of the workforce, KIA’s practices fit the criteria.

Customer Feedback and Communication

KIA provides multiple customer service procedures that clients use in case there is a necessity for solving problems or asking questions. Moreover, the company is actively trying to build dialogues between representatives and users as often as possible without overpowering buyers with promotion content. KIA has developed a mobile app that covers multiple service areas. The app allows individuals to purchase new automobiles or parts, acquire maintenance services, and dispose of old vehicles. Clients are able to access multiple options online without having the inconvenience of going to an office, booking appointments, and possibly meeting other uncomfortable difficulties.

While the app is designed to provide comfort and easy communication tools with KIA representatives, it also focuses on ensuring high quality. In this case, the quality is highlighted in the overall customer service domain, which KIA strives to improve each year. The application is a relatively new implementation, but it is already an excellent way for KIA users to contact support teams and have 1-on-1 interactions regarding the corporation’s products. Moreover, the company uses such dialogues to have a better understanding of customers’ demands. Effectively communicating with clients allows businesses to receive first-hand feedback and improve their practices based on the commentary.

Data Privacy

The quality which KIA promises also extends to the field of data privacy. For the company to ensure that the customer’s private information such as full name, date of birth, and ID number remain private after these details are filled in online, KIA built a Personal Information Center. The center deals with securing all the information from being public. Moreover, team members who have access to such details are trained and informed about privacy policies and regulations to minimize the risks for leaks. The data security systems are renewed every year in order for customers to avoid difficulties related to keeping their personal details off public platforms. KIA’s quality security services are designed to mitigate all the cyber issues that may occur.

Advantages of Using TQM in KIA

As mentioned prior, KIA became much more successful and profitable after implementing TQM strategies in its corporate agenda. Furthermore, the advantages of using total quality management principles have been noticeable on multiple organizational levels and have had a significant effect on KIA as a brand. Such changes indeed led to a more prominent consumer demand, brand recognition worldwide, and revenue that keeps increasing due to the focus on quality and customer satisfaction.

Overcoming Crises

Since KIA Motors was a bankrupt company, Hyundai purchased the majority of the shares. KIA was in deplorable conditions in the 90s, as were multiple Korean automobile companies. However, the changes that have been structurally applied have resulted in more than 600% revenue growth based on the comparison between the 2006 results and 2016 (Park 46). These achievements have been reached due to the parent company’s investment in quality, image, and a change in consumer targeting policies. After following specific guidelines illustrated in the notion of total quality management, KIA overcame the crisis and is now one of the most popular automobile manufacturers worldwide.

Global Recognition

Back in the 90s and early 2000s, KIA was a brand that buyers would consider due to its affordable products. However, the company itself was considered unreliable and low-quality because of consumers’ technical problems with KIA automobiles. The image of the corporation had changed when TQM concepts were incorporated into the organizational structure. While having a KIA car was being associated with potential problems and technical issues in the past, the situation has gradually changed. The shift is portrayed in the company’s overall popularity on the global arena and the number of potential customers who consider purchasing a KIA car due to its reliability, quality promises, and affordable pricing. Total quality management’s advantage has been a complete change of the image of the brand in the eyes of the consumers, which is beneficial in terms of new clients and further revenue increase.

Profitability

It is certain that every company strives for better revenue. However, TQM is based on investing the profit in further quality development and staff training. KIA’s revenue has exponentially grown, and the company is now in 69^th place in the list of the most marketable brands in the world (Park 46). Such a significant change is especially important if the prior financial problems are taken into consideration. KIA’s profitability and continuous financial improvement are evidence of TQM being advantageous for the corporation. While TQM requires significant investments in quality advancement and staff performance increase, the revenue that follows such changes balances the spending and makes them worth considering. KIA’s profitability is directly linked to the reforms on the structural levels and would not be present without an emphasis on quality and a shift in management.

Awards

There a multiple ways in which consumers can show a company that they support them. This includes purchasing products, giving positive feedback, recommending the brand to other people, promoting it online, etc. However, such overviews are often objective and driven by personal interests. When professionals who are not aligned with the corporation in any way can assess its performance, the results tend to be more honest and unbiased. KIA has won multiple quality awards over the years. There are more than 150 titles that KIA mentions on its website (KIA). In this case, professionals, engineers, mechanics, and car reviewers with expertise in the field have compared KIA automobiles with cars from other brands and decided that the KIA ones are of higher quality. Such awards show how much the brand has grown due to total quality management.

Furthermore, it is essential to mention that some of the competitions are directly linked to how customers feel about KIA. Regular people were able to assess their experiences with the brand and their overall overview of the company’s products. As the results are being measured and compared, KIA is often above other car manufacturers with more financial potency, experience on the market, and influence. Such outcomes are another pieces of evidence that illustrate how using TQM can be advantageous for corporations that engage in said practices

Disadvantages of Using TQM in KIA

Undoubtedly, TQM is an effective strategy that creates a positive corporate environment based on constant growth, innovation, and quality improvement. The aim is to satisfy consumer demand and provide the best services and products. However, such an emphasis on quality requires significant investments. This was the case for KIA, or more precisely, the parent company, Hyundai. As mentioned before, the initial management policy consisted of a major investment in rebranding and corporate changes. While such measures ended up being profitable in the long run, the prominent financial loss in the first years is a risk that many corporations cannot overcome or manage.

KIA’s first years have also been challenging because of this. Since TQM implementation requires an initial period of training and design, the investment does not instantly turn into profit. The policy has been cost-effective based on the following corporate results, such as an increase in revenue and better brand imaging. However, the fact that TQM implementation has been costly for Hyundai as a parent company is one disadvantage that may cause other similar corporations to turn the idea down and chose other strategies for quality improvement.

Conclusion

KIA Motors had been going through financial struggles after the brand had decided to expand from the Korean market to the global arena. The products, while affordable, could not reach the same standards as other car companies. Due to a lack of focus on quality, a less advanced industrial sector in Korea, and high expectations from worldwide customers, the corporation went bankrupt. When Hyundai became the parent company, a major investment was made to improve KIA as a brand and advance the quality of the vehicles.

TQM strategies have been used to create a reliable image of KIA Motors, build high-quality products, and train experts to advance and satisfy customer demand. TQM has been advantageous for KIA in terms of innovations, crises mitigation, global recognition, revenue, and prestigious awards. The company uses total quality management in such fields as customer care, regulations, employee training, and data privacy policies. However, the implementations of these strategies have required a major investment, which is one disadvantage that has been minimized due to the following profitability. KIA Motors has experienced a significant shift from a struggling car manufacturer to one of the most valuable brands in the world due to an emphasis on total quality management. Now that the corporation is successful in regards to having a loyal consumer base, steady market growth, high competitiveness, and adequate revenue, it is certain that TQM has facilitated all the benefits.

Works Cited

Worldwide KIA. KIA Motors. Web.

Dahlgaard-Park, Su Mi, et al. “The Evolution and Convergence of Total Quality Management and Management Theories.” Total Quality Management & Business Excellence, vol. 29, no. 9-10, 2018, pp. 1108–1128., Web.

Firend, Alan Rasch. Business model simplified: With examples from global companies, 2018. Google Books.

Hyun, Young-Suk. “Catch-up to Lead in Korea’s Automobile Industry.”New Frontiers of the Automobile Industry, 2019, pp. 229–254., Web.

Park, Young-Eun. “The Endless Challenges of Kia Motors for Globalization : A Case Study on Kia in Saudi Arabia.” Journal of Industrial Distribution & Business, vol. 9, no. 9, 2018, pp. 45–52., Web.

Thakkar, Yugal, and Akshit Jain. “A Study of the Reasons of Decline in Automobile Exports of South Korea.” International Journal of Advance Research, Ideas and Innovations in Technology, vol. 3, no. 1, 2018.

Introduction

Marriott Hotel International is one of the largest lodging companies globally. This company has maneuvered in more than 68 countries under the leadership of Mr. Marriott who is the chairperson and the chief executive officer.

The leadership of Marriott is considered as a success of this company as it started as a family restaurant to a global lodging business. As the leader of the company, the chairperson says that the company’s main vision is lead in offering lodging services in the world.

The vision of this company is grounded on several issues like taking good care of the guests, possession of wide operating knowledge, making use of skilled and diverse workforce, and finally offering one of the best lodging services. Under the leadership of Marriott, the company has for several years continued to enjoy a strong customer base and an improving growth of profitability.

Total Quality Management

The total quality management is a theory applied in most of organizations in efforts of improving quality and performance to meet or exceed customers’ needs. The only way through which the company can achieve this is through application of quality functions and services in the entire company (Mukherjee, 2006).

The total quality management incorporates the general quality actions taken by a company such as quality development, quality control, and above all ensuring there is quality assurance in the services offered by the company.

The Origin and Development

The total quality management involves all levels of management as well as all the company employees. The origin of total quality management is believed to be quality assurance methods that existed during the First World War. The development of total quality management was made possible by the large-scale production that emerged after the war.

This large production was associated with poor quality of the products services. To minimize the chances of producing poor-quality services and products, some quality officers were appointed to ensure the entire production was of quality.

After the First World War, it was a common exercise in almost all manufacturing companies to inspect the quality of goods and services produced. The emergence of statistical quality control, gave an assurance of testing the quality of sample pieces, as it was not possible to inspect every commodity.

By mid 1950s, the quality control exercise was crucial, especially in Japanese industries, whereby all the employees could adopt the system within the company.

By the late 1970s, the total quality exercise was widely used mostly by the large companies and was used by all employees starting from the top management to casual laborers. When other nations discovered how products manufactured in Japan were of good quality, they also started adopting the exercise of quality control.

TQM Techniques in Improving Efficiency of Business

When companies make use of total quality management, there is a high probability of improving efficiency and effectiveness of the entire organization. For instance, Marriott Hotel International have applied several techniques of TQM to ensure a positive outcome (Mukherjee, 2006). Through the assistance of the executive management, employees are trained on the concepts of offering good quality services to the customers.

Good Quality Services

The main techniques that the management team of Marriott Hotel International is employing qualified staff, who give a positive approach to those sensitive areas like the check-in point, serving customers within the shortest time possible, offering a friendly approach, and solving customers’ problems.

Cleanliness of the rooms and wonderful housekeeping services may make all other wrongs to be forgiven by any guest. One aspect that constitutes to the good reputation of this company is the cleanliness, especially the admirable housekeeping services that are offered.

Managers Training

Moreover, to make their total quality management systems more effective, Marriott is providing an extensive training to all area managers as soon as they are hired. The major reason of doing this is to ensure that the leaders of the company are enlightened on how to offer quality services. Without a good leadership, it can be very challenging for any organization to offer best services and to attain its overall objectives.

Once a manager is employed in this company, before offering services, they are booked into a one-week training program, where they are equipped with the necessary knowledge and skills to enable them serve the customers well. After undergoing this training, they are responsible of teaching other members of staff on how to offer quality services to customers.

Responsibility

According to various research done by several analysts, the outcomes of poor quality services in any business are very costly. Most of the time, the experience of poor quality services in an organization occurs due to having employees who are not empowered fully to solve quality shortcomings or presence of employees who are not willing to give adequate results.

In our day-to-day lives, we have also experienced inadequate services in various organizations whereby, once served you feel like never coming back for more services. These negative experiences occur especially because of having a team of staff who never care about what they deliver, as they are never held responsible for their mistakes (Mukherjee, 2006).

To some extent, the management of the company is the source of this poor service delivery, because of failure to acknowledge employees that every person would be held responsible for his or her deeds. Once a company starts trending in such manner, the likely consequence is losing customers and creating of a good opportunity for the competitors to take over and serve the customers.

Improving Customer Care

Currently, the company has managed to come up with 18 different lodging brands that include limited service and full service that have a variety of services to serve the needs of any traveler. The company is currently managing and contracting various hotels and resorts under the Marriott.

The work coverage of the company has widened with time due to expansion of its services. This expansion on the other hand has resulted to increment of the customers globally. Starting from the financial base of the company to its customer network, the company has a good record of expansion for the period it has existed in the market.

It is an obligation of every company whether a non-profit or profit-making to ensure that its customers are served satisfactorily with the best products or services. For the company to succeed in its operations, be it manufacturing or any other kind of business, the customer should be treated well through provision of quality services.

Marriott Hotel International

Marriott being one of the biggest hotels internationally, with good reputation of its quality services, it has adopted a holistic system of formal Total Quality Management. This system is meant to ensure that the increasing customer coverage is offered with the best services of high quality.

The hotel has made some extra efforts to ensure that every section of the hotel is equipped with quality services that are customer-driven. The Marriott Hotel International is under the category of service industry, and so its mandate to achieve its goals and objectives is to ensure its customers are happy. It is the nature of customers to share their experiences with others whether they are satisfied or not satisfied.

For the company to ensure that their customers share a positive experience, the company should concentrate in making customers happy through admirable services. The reputation of the hotel and that of the brand depends mainly by the reactions of the customers. Customer satisfaction is achieved easily through the application of Total Quality Management.

Due to the wide acquired experience by the management of Marriott Hotel International for the long period they have been in the market, they have pointed out the two main areas that are likely to be criticized by guests.

The rooms and the check-ins are the most sensitive areas that require high-quality services, especially the front office. In Marriott Hotel International these areas are well catered for by highly qualified staff. Both the first contact and impression that guests receive in a service industry is very crucial, as he may keep coming back or may never desire such an experience again.

How Total Quality Management Contributes to Improving Quality, Efficiency & Effectiveness

Successful businesses like Marriott Hotel International have a management system that understands the likely effect of offering quality services to the customers. Due to such realization, the most competitive businesses keep on regularly improving their quality standards.

Other Companies

Regularly, through the business News, we hear of most famous companies declaring that their priority is to make the dreams of their customers come true through offering quality services that would satisfy the customers and keep them coming back for more products and services.

For instance, we heard of Ford Motor Company and Honda Motor Company announcing their first priority of satisfying their customers through wonderful and long-lasting products that are friendly to the customer’s finances and to the environment (Clarke, 2007). Despite the fact that these companies are among the leaders globally, they still insist in improving the quality of their products to keep their customers happy.

Even if the company have been in the market for a long duration of time, and have acquired many customers, the journey should not end there, as the customers’ needs are as dynamic as the products or the services in the market. The tastes and preferences of the customers keep on changing with the advancement of the technology and the whole globalization.

This calls for the companies to keep working harder to be in a position to handle the dynamic changes in the market, especially the customer’s needs (Clarke, 2007). Although Marriott has been in the market for quite a long period, they have continually embraced the current total quality management systems to be in a position to handle the challenges during the tough economic periods.

Company Holistic System

Just like other successful companies, Marriott Hotel International has for several years tried to apply the total quality management system to handle and ensure long-term survival and success through customer satisfaction. Several policies have been put in place to ensure this holistic system they adopted works out well.

Due to their improved customer coverage, the productivity of the company also increased, and this is achieved by making all the employees in the company to participate and feel as part of the entire company. The employees are encouraged by this system to assist in improving the various processes found in the company, services, and making the culture of the company a long-lasting one.

Quality leaders such as Joseph Juran have contributed much in interpreting what such a system should entail to ensure a productivity results. The total quality management system comes up with practices that when utilized well the company benefits much from offering good quality services and an increased productivity.

Some of the practices that Marriott Hotel International has incorporated in their operations include putting every employee busy to work to accomplish the transformation (Mukherjee, 2006). During the working hours, employees are ever busy with everyone taking a close inspection to his or her duties. Idleness of the employees is something unheard of in Marriott Hotel International.

During the time of relaxing, the employees are engaged in some talks meant to improve the services of the company. Another practice that has made this holistic system a success is through the provision of education programs to improve the efficiency of every employee.

Employee Management

As technology advances, the demands of customers in the business also keep on changing and that is why these education programs are so important to the employees to keep them updated. Another aspect is by all means breaking barriers among staff working areas, if an employee discovers that there is something not attended to, if the person responsible is not available, he or she should attend to that duty first.

Incase of any problem or a challenge employees are given a break through of reporting such issues as quick as possible to the right people for the problem to be fixed on time (Clarke, 2007). For a long duration of time, the Marriott and other successful companies they have been able to utilize the practices of total quality management for positive impacts in their companies.

The application of this complex system requires committed leaders and other team of staffs to work together through supporting one another to ensure the company improves its productivity.

Bad Company Culture

However, not in all cases that the application of total quality management ends up successful. Severally, some companies have reported failure of total quality management approach (Mukherjee, 2006). For instance, if a company had a weak culture from the beginning it would always be hard for this system to change that culture within a short time.

A bad company culture remains in the minds of the company’s stakeholders, for a very long period. Even if the company may change, the stakeholders do not admit the change as they believe in what they experienced in the past. Another aspect that may result to a failure is lack of support and commitment from the leaders.

It would be hard for the employees to bring change through this system without the help of the top management. The practices of total quality management require the contribution of every individual in the company.

Costs

When a company is offering poor quality services, there is a great cost of customer dissatisfaction and loss of business . When on the other hand is fighting to achieve good quality services there is a cost to be incurred like prevention costs.

These are the costs that Marriott and other companies have incurred in the process of preventing the occurrence of poor quality services in the company. These processes include maintaining records and data, as well as the cost of training the employees when setting them ready to handle the challenges.

Another type of cost is appraisal costs that are incurred by the company in its efforts of uncovering defects. Another type of cost is internal failure cost, a cost that incurs within the premises, and is realized before the service or the product reaches the customer . All these costs are associated with the efforts of the company to avoid offering poor quality services or products.

These costs are considered less expensive than the cost of offering poor quality services or products. Marriott hotel international has made efforts to incur such costs, than to allow poor quality services that would limit its continuity in the market. Through this, this company has continued pleasing its customers through quality services.

Criticism of Total Quality Management Approaches

As much as total quality management is useful to various organizations, it faces several criticisms. To begin with, the total quality system is not directly related to the general organizational strategy. The decisions that are made by the organization concerning total quality management are not connected to finances or other marketing approaches (Mukherjee, 2006).

It is argued that quality issues should be part of functional side, and should not be treated as a separate entity. Another important factor that total quality management lacks is a clear planning for its implementation, which should indicate the goals and objectives, and how they should be achieved.

Moreover, the TQM consists of unrealistic goals due to lack of managerial skills because of failure to train employees about the total quality management philosophy. The employees should be fully equipped with knowledge of TQM philosophy.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the Marriott hotel international has benefitted much from the application of total quality management. Just like any other hospitality industry, total quality management is important due to the competition of the customers . There is an increased number of hotels offering hospitality services globally, thus for a hotel to retain its customers and attract more should offer quality services.

The shortcomings of this system are outweighed by its advantages, and so its application to any organization is of benefit. The teamwork of the management team and all levels of employers can work best for this system. For the employees to adhere to the system, they require much support from the top management.

Bibliography

Bank, J, (2002), Essence of Management series, New York, Prentice Hall.

Books LIc, (2010), Marriott International: Islamabad Marriott Hotel International, New York, General Books LLC.

Clarke, A, (2007), International hospitality management: concepts and cases, London, Butterworth-Heinemann.

Hakes, C, (2004), Total quality management: the key to business improvement, Michigan, Springer.

Mukherjee, PN, (2006), Total Quality Management, New York, PHI Learning Pvt, Ltd.

Introduction

Human resource management has become one of the most vital emphases of the management in most organizations. The success of every organization to a great extent depends on the effectiveness of human resource management.

In both manufacturing and service industries, the quality of products or services depends on the effectiveness and level of human resources management. Human resources management plays a big role in organizational and man power management, personnel administration and lastly industrial management all of which are vital in ensuring that quality services are rendered by the organization.

HRM is an important tool in ensuring that there is effective total quality management in an organization. In both service and production industry, total quality management is crucial because it ensures products or services of the best quality are produced by the company.

The aim of every organization is to produce the best services or products that will best serve the interest of the customers or offer great satisfaction to them (MacMillan, 41). The whole idea of customer satisfaction is addressed by total quality management commonly referred to as TQM. Human resources management plays a big role in ensuring that there is TQM in an organization. It should therefore be maintained at a high level to ensure successful TQM

The general purpose of this research is to investigate the role of human resources management in ensuring that there is successful implementation of total quality management. Specifically, the research explores the concept of human resources management, the concept of total quality management as a component of HRM and then the role of HRM in ensuring successful implementation of TQM. All these areas are tackled in the context of hospitality industry. We first describe the methodology used in obtaining the information presented.

Methodology

The information presented in this research was gathered from different literature materials that have been published concerning the topic in question. The books, journals, web pages and articles concerning human resource management, total quality management and the role of HRM in ensuring successful implementation of TQM were also used in this research.

There was no formal research that was carried out but secondary sources were used to obtain the information. Personal opinions and experiences are maintained to a minimum level. The literature materials obtained about human resources management and the role of HRM in the success of TQM are discussed in the context of hospitality industry.

The concept of human resource management in hospitality industry

According to McNamara (1), human resources management is a composite function consisting mainly of deciding or assessing the staffing needs of an organization, decisions on how to fill these needs, recruiting and training the best qualified candidates for the posts, maintaining high performance of employees, conducting performance appraisal and ensuring that employees comply to various regulation in the course of their service.

It is also the role of HRM to ensure that employees get their entitlements and other benefits as per their contract of service and at the right time. The employee policies (personal) and record regarding their induction and contract of service are also recorded and kept by the HRM.

In the hospitality industry, quality of services offered should be maintained at a high level in order for any organization in the industry to stay in business. The success of every business in this industry is directly dependent on the level of quality of services rendered to the customers.

To ensure that customers’ satisfaction is met, quality of services must be maintained commensurate with the customer’s expectations. Customer satisfaction is the whole idea of HRM developing and implementing the concept of TQM that will be discussed in the later chapters. TQM is actually a function of the roles of human resource management in an organization.

According to Nickson (1), it is the role of the HRM in the hospitality industry to come up with HRM policies regarding the employment needs of the industry and the criteria to be used in selecting the best staffs to serve the companies.

The aim of these polices is to ensure that the industry gets the right persons to work for it every time it is in need. This will in turn ensure that the company delivers the best quality to satisfy the needs of the customers. HRM also lays strategies of ensuring that the organizational culture within the organization is well manned in order to ensure quality services to customers.

The HRM ensures that the culture is upheld and that all the employees of the organization work towards achieving the goals of the organization. The new recruits are introduced to the organizational culture and are trained on how to ensure quality service delivery.

To ensure that the whole organization is focused to providing quality services, the human resource management is charged with the role of ensuring the success of organizational and man power management, personnel administration and lastly industrial management. These areas cover the main areas of the organization that are vital in maintaining the customer royalty. The HRM therefore plays a big role in ensuring the success of the organization and satisfaction of the customers.

The concept of total quality management as a major component of HRM

The role of human resource management is made complete in any organization when total quality management is achieved. The two concepts are inseparable in the event of appraisal of the performance of the organization. The need to ensure customer satisfaction through offering quality services or products is the core reason of instituting the two departments in the organization.

The future of an organization and its strong positioning in the market depends on the level of satisfaction of its customers. Customer satisfaction is a goal that every organization strives to realize. The success of an organization depends on how well it satisfies its customers. All the practices set by the company that helps to ensure that the organization fully meets the needs of the customers are referred to as total quality management or TQM.

According to American Society for Quality (1), total quality management entails continuous measurement and improvement of the extent to which the organization fulfils the requirements of the customers. TQM employs strategies and effective communication within the organization in order to incorporate the quality principles in to the culture and activities of the organization in order to ensure that all the activities are geared towards satisfying the customers.

Total quality management is a long-term success strategy that a company seeks to achieve through customer satisfaction. In a successful total quality management, all members of the organization work together to improve the quality of products, services and the culture within the organization in order to achieve total customer satisfaction (O’Donovan 39). All members of the organization need to be taught on the ways of ensuring total quality management within the organization.

Due to globalization of business, the organizations have developed a new view for quality and to survive in the market, the Human resources management must ensure that the quality of products and services are in standard commensurate with the needs of the customers. TQM ensures that all the goods and services produced by the organization are fit for the customers. The TQM philosophy is to ensure that the there are no wastage or there are zero defects in production of products and services and that all customers are satisfied.

The role of HRM in ensuring successful implementation of TQM

The success of TQM implementation is made complete by the intervention of HRM. As mentioned earlier, TQM is a major component of the role of HRM.

In ancient businesses, the role of quality improvement was taken as the role of quality improvement specialists like product and process designers but in the current business environment, it has become a major role of HRM. This is due to increasing industry demand and the increase in customer quality expectations.

The HRM department is today charged with the responsibility of ensuring quality development across all department of the organization; the role it executes through Total Quality Management philosophy (Kotelnikov 1). If the HRM in an organization fails to take its charge of implementing Total Quality Management, the other departments will fail as well because they have less expertise of training and quality development.

The HRM must therefore ensure that TQM is well implemented in order to give way to the other department to focus on quality as a key to success. Training the employee on the principle of Total Quality Management is of paramount importance because it equips the employees with the skills they require in delivering quality services to the customers.

TQM as a management strategy considers quality as the key to the success of the organizations in the market. In the hospitality industry, the core business is service to customers and the aim of this services ensuring customer satisfaction. The HRM has been training frontline staffs to ensure that they serve the customers the best way possible (Skinner 110).

It is therefore the responsibility of the HRM to ensure that the staffs are well trained and developed in their career in order to ensure that they offer the services based on the quality goals of the organization. There should also be training to update the staffs on the chances that have occurred in the TQM. This will ensure that the staffs are well equipped to offer quality services always based on the policies of TQM.

For HRM to combat competition that has been increasing in the market, it has placed more emphasis on TQM. This is because the TQM is the determinant of the business or organization value perceived by the customers.

To keep pace with the growing competition, the HRM in the hospitality industry strategize on the mechanisms of improving the quality of services offered to customers. These mechanisms or strategies are implemented across all departments. TQM is therefore ensured in all departments and customers reap full satisfaction because they get quality services.

The human resource management is a vital tool in the implementation of total quality management and acts as a senior management tool of TQM strategy by training and developing the staffs so that they can provide skillful support to TQM. Long term training is conducted so as to shift the culture of the organization to the direction desirable for the TQM.

The long term training ensures establishment of a strong organizational culture built on quality thoughts. This is vital as it positions the company to cope with or keep pace with the changing market environment.

HRM also boosts TQM through its strong system of quality-first orientation. The Human Resource Management department has a strong system of characterized by recruitment and selection, performance appraisal and compensation system. This system ensures that at every stage, quality is instilled in the employees.

Quality recruitment and selection ensures that persons capable of meeting the quality standards stipulated by the TQM policy are hired. These persons are thoroughly trained to enhance their skills and make them able to apply their theoretical knowledge and skills practically.

Performance appraisal helps in determining the level at which the employees have been able to perform their duties and what they have achieved. This helps identify the higher performers and the task that one is good in. This might necessitate shift of employees from one department to another in order to ensure quality is delivered in all department. The specialists in a certain areas are also identified depending on the task they perform exemplary.

The idea in this form of strategy is to ensure the skills and the ability that the employees are endowed with is optimally utilized in improving TQM. The compensation or reward system is meant to recognize employees with exemplary performance and reward them. This is a very crucial role of HRM because higher performers are energized and motivated to work harder. The quality of service rendered by the employees is dependent on the level of motivation of the employees.

This improves Total Quality Management because employees are motivated to deliver quality. When these roles of the organization are done continuously, the customers will reap total satisfaction from the organization and the organization growth potential increases. According to Heathfield (1), reward system may include giving the employees prizes or promoting them depending on the decision of HRM.

The TQM that most organizations have adopted has called for the Human Resources Management to institute a participative system that is allowing the organizations to empower its employees to take part in the implementation of best quality in an organization. This participative model is important because all the members of the organization are involved.

To a great extent, it improves decision making process and ensures that all the decisions made address the needs of the members of the organization. Allowing members to participate in the implementation or quality policies motivates them to work even harder and quality services are ensured as a result. The participative model ensures that problem solving is performed in an open environment so as all the members of the organization can learn.

This sharpens the employees and improves their problem solving skills and also ensures there is transparency within the organization. This is an atmosphere conducive for quality service delivery since the employees are involved in the issues affecting the organization and are therefore they exercise caution. It also gives the employees a sense of ownership and they feel that they are really part of the organization.

According to Wilkinson (42), this is a motivation factor because employees also feel a sense of responsibility and they gear their potential towards achieving the goals of the organization. With this kind of motivation and devotion of the employees towards realizing the goals of the organization, the services rendered by the employees are of good quality and capable of satisfying the desires and the expectations of the customers.

Employees take it as their own responsibility to achieve the goals of the organization because they take them as their own goals. They do every act in keeping with the vision of the organization. They get married to the vision of the organization and devote their effort to realize it.

The HRM also plays a role of ensuring there is retention of the best employees. The implementation of TQM requires experienced, well trained and highly qualified persons to achieve it successfully. The role of HRM is to ensure that the best employees are satisfied by the salary they get and the work environment so that they are retained in the organization.

In the hospitality industry, there is high movement of the staffs from one company to another. It is the responsibility of a company’s HRM to ensure that its employees are not attracted by the terms and the work atmosphere of another company. Employees will always move to where they are best satisfied by the work conditions and other terms of environment.

The other role of HRM in the implementation of TQM is HRM department acting as a role model to the other departments in the organization. The HRM serves the other departments in the organization and therefore it must ensure that it delivers quality services to them.

The HRM department should therefore regard other department as its customers and serve them the best way to satisfy them (KING, 14). There should therefore be continuous improvement in quality service delivery by HRM to other departments. This will create a culture of continuous quality improvement within the organization. The other department will learn to give quality services to the customers as they receive from the HRM Department.

Lastly, the HRM demonstrate its commitment to ensuring that the principles of TQM should be upheld. The department will follow the principles of TQM in serving other departments and this will instill the principles to the other departments. For instance the HRM can be customer oriented and focus on the needs of the customers which are the other departments (Armstrong 23).

In cases of problem solving, team approach could be adopted to ensure participation of other departments. The other principle is to train the employees on how quality service to the customers could be ensured. The HRM should also focus on the strategies to prevent the problems instead of solving them. The idea here is to ensure that the problems encountered in dealing with the customers currently are not encountered in future.

Conclusion

The concept of HRM and TQM are inseparable in any organization. Due to the increased competition in the market, The Human Resources Management Departments of many organizations have concentrated on implementing Total Quality Management as a strategy of winning a bigger market share.

TQM has the responsibility of ensuring that there are zero defects in the production of goods and services. This is aimed at ensuring that the customers are fully satisfied by the products or services rendered.

The success of TQM is the responsibility of HRM. For service industry like hospitality industry, TQM is vital as the customers measure their satisfaction with the quality of services they receive. TQM is therefore a major strategy of HRM for ensuring the success of the organization through improving the services ands products offered by the company to the customers.

Works Cited

American society for quality (ASQ). Total Quality Management. Milwaukee. 2006. Web.

Armstrong, Michael. A Handbook of Human Resource Management Practice (10th Ed.). London: Kogan Page, 2006.

Heathfield, Susan M. Performance Management: Performance Improvement Plan: New York, 2010. Web.

KING, Carol. Service quality assurance is different, Quality Progress, pp. 14-18, 2007.

Kotelnikov, Vadim. Total Quality Management (TQM): An Integrated Approach to Quality and Continuous Improvement. UK: Ten3 Business e-Coach, 2010. Web.

MacMillan. Seizing Competitive Initiative. The Journal of Business Strategy. pp. 43-57, 2008.

McNamara, Carter. Human resource management (and talented management). USA: Free Management Library, 2010. Web.

MILL, Hanley. Managing the service encounter, The Cornell HRA Quarterly, pp. 39-45, 2008.

Nickson, Dennis. Human Resource Management for the Hospitality and Tourism Industries. Scotland: Scottish Hotel School, University of Strathclyde, 2006. Web.

O’Donovan, Gabrielle. The Corporate Culture Handbook: How to Plan, Implement and Measure a Successful Culture Change Program. Raheny: The Liffey Press, 2006. Print.

Skinner, Seymour. Managing Human Resources. Harvard Business Review, 2006, pp. 107-118.

Wilkinson, Adrian. Empowerment: theory and practice. Personnel Review 27 (1): 40–56, 2007.

Introduction

In the constantly changing business environment, organisations need to undergo substantial changes to maintain a strong competitive position, keep up with the rapid pace of technologic advancement, fulfil increasing customer expectations and follow evolving national and international regulations. To cope with serious risks, companies implement a number of techniques aimed at gaining organisational ability to respond to customer demands in service, price and quality and, at the same time, accomplish internal corporate goals – increasing competitiveness and improving business performance.

Quality management is commonly recognized as a major source of competitive advantage and one of the critical factors driving global competition (Punnakitikashem et al. 2010). Total Quality Management (TQM) is a management philosophy that regards quality as an important success factor for sustainable organisational growth and development. TQM is grounded on a set of managerial principles aimed to apply resources in a way that would increase stakeholders’ satisfaction with the provided service (Das, Kumar & Kumar 2011).

The factors that define TQM efficiency include leadership and management style, employee commitment, benchmarking, training, regular refinement of performance, quality measurement systems, customer service culture, knowledge management and customer focus (Cai 2009). Customer focus may be considered one of the most significant elements of TQM practices because it is a crucial driver of quality improvement. The researchers define customer focus in terms of both internal and external relationship practices. Thus, the term customer focus refers to a number of procedures and techniques aimed at dealing with customer interests, as well as the internal organisational ‘strategic emphasis placed on [the] customer’ that is considered a key aspect of TQM practices (Cai 2009, p. 370).

A growing body of research recognizes the favourable effect of TQM practices implementation on overall customer satisfaction and the improvement of performance quality, which ultimately lead to gaining a competitive advantage (Talib, Rahman & Qureshi 2013; Talib, Rahman & Qureshi, 2011; Jaca & Psomas 2015). Customer focus and customer satisfaction management are among the dominant TQM practices that help enterprises to achieve positive financial results and organisational effectiveness (Talib et al. 2013). Therefore, TQM activities aimed at establishing good customer relationships and considering customer needs in the process of strategic planning may provide an opportunity to strengthen quality performance and acquire significant advantages in a highly competitive environment.

Literature Review

In the context of organisational operations, quality is deeply interrelated with customer satisfaction and loyalty, and it is also considered a ‘key to value creation’ (Kristianto, Ajmal & Sandhu 2012, p. 32). The researchers suggest that the development of high-quality customer service and culture, and the objective of increasing customer satisfaction, are essential to TQM, and these goals can be achieved through consideration of customers’ perception of quality, interests and priorities, as well as compliance with the top-ranked standards of performance (Cai 2009; Conti 2013; Ueno 2012).

It is considered that the establishment and maintenance of an open customer relationship are vital to the process of new product development and design because this helps manufacturers and marketing practitioners to comprehend customer needs and interests more profoundly (Jung, Wang & Wu 2009). Customer preferences are continuously changing, and management needs to evaluate the shifts in customer expectations on a regular basis and align business operations and strategic goals according to the identified changes (Cai 2009).

Implementation of the customer focus principle allows companies to become more committed to competence and flexibility, and thus more responsive and sensitive towards shifts in the market. In this way, efficient customer-oriented strategies entail the generation of competitive advantages. The researchers note that by seeking feedback through surveys or analysis of complaints and recommendations – commonly used TQM practices – companies obtain an opportunity to sustain good relationships with customers that consequently lead to the development of loyalty (Jung et al. 2009). The findings make it clear that customer focus and customer satisfaction are of tremendous importance for high-quality performance.

Customer-oriented culture

In the majority of existing excellence models (EMs), a considerable amount of effort is devoted to customer satisfaction. For example, the fundamental values included in the European Excellence Model are leadership and management, uniformity of organisational mission and culture, constant development and learning, innovation and improvement, social responsibility and customer focus (Dahlgaard-Park 2009).

The comparative analysis of sixteen distinct EMs and national quality awards (i.e., Deming Prize, the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the Singapore Quality Award, the Australian Business Excellence Award, etc.) conducted by Talwar (2009) makes it clear that customer focus is among the common core values included in the conceptual basis of these quality performance models.

The findings emphasise the importance of the customer focus principle and lead to the conclusion that it is a vital element of performance improvement initiations. Additionally, the extent to which the conceptual EMs’ components are included in the corporate culture defines success in the achievement of business excellence and design of appropriate TQM strategy (Bolboli & Reiche 2015).

The customer focus principle implies the execution of activities aiming to create multiple benefits for stakeholders. Customer focus practices involve various techniques that support organisations in the analysis of consumers’ requirements and interests. Some researchers suggest that companies increase the quality of management and overall performance by exercising customer relationship practices aimed to establish direct contact with them (Lenka, Suar & Mohapatra 2010; Su, Tsai & Hsu, 2010).

The direct personal contact established by using various communication tools, such as customer satisfaction surveys, random telephone calls, focus group and user group interviews, etc., may help organisations to become closer to their customers and increase customer retention (Lenka et al. 2010; Su et al. 2010). As such, communication may be regarded as a crucial element of customer focus in TQM.

Customer relationship practices including direct interaction, analysis of customer expectations and feedback; and maintenance of positive employee-customer relationships can help to increase customers’ indirect involvement in product development processes and contribute to employees’ better understanding of consumer needs. However, the researchers also emphasise the importance of firms’ internal orientation towards their stakeholders and perceive customer-oriented corporate culture as a basic, integral part of TQM strategy at the overall organisational level (Cai 2009).

Internal customer orientation aims to strengthen the practical aspects of TQM. For example, it is observed that organisational policies, culture, and regulations support employee commitment to customer satisfaction and improvement of service quality (Oakland 2011; Niu & Fan 2015). The principle of customer focus may also be regarded as a corporate value that defines the extent of a company’s determination to attain excellent customer satisfaction, while the practices aimed towards the improvement of customer relationships define the level of development and frequency of specific customer focus instruments’ utilisation (Cai 2009). In this way, the principle of customer focus, integrated into corporate culture, may be regarded as a precondition for the execution of customer relationship practices.

Organisational culture and leadership’s commitment, as well as stakeholder orientation, are the key critical factors of TQM’s success (Calvo-Mora et al. 2013). These factors are interdependent, and it is possible to say that the efficiency of each particular TQM practice, including customer focus activities, is significantly affected by the extent to which every TQM’s critical factors are enabled. In addition, researchers emphasise the dominant role of a well-developed corporate culture and politics, as well as systematic knowledge management, in the successful attainment of quality performance improvement, customer satisfaction and other customer-oriented strategic objectives (Baird, Hu & Reeve 2011).

Customer focus practices

In TQM organisations, every marketing and product development activity (research, advertising, customer service and staff training, etc.) should be accomplished according to high standards embedded in EMs (Sampaio, Saraiva & Monteiro 2012). It is considered that excellent customer service can improve the overall perception of a product, even if its quality is not perfect.

Therefore, organisations need to regard the quality of service as additional customer value and listen to the ‘voices’ of customers, in an attempt to comply with their expectations and increase product demand (Cappelli et al. 2010, p. 267) Marketing research is considered the major instrument for the accumulation of information and data analysis, assisting in the development of customer understanding. Marketing research instruments can be quantitative (statistical) or qualitative (descriptive).

Quantitative methods of data analysis – surveys and questionnaires – are commonly used customer feedback tools. It is observed that service quality is strongly associated with customer satisfaction, and organisations thus need to develop instruments to measure multiple parameters of quality performance and simultaneously capture feedback (Caemmerer & Wilson 2010). For example, research instruments developed according to the SERQUAL model help to identify and assess both physical and non-physical attributes of quality and measure consumers’ perception of organisational performance (Ooi, Lin & Chong 2011).

Cappelli et al. (2010) emphasise the importance of customer satisfaction design, which needs to provide information that would be simple to interpret, would cover many areas of service observation and would link the conceptual and practical components of service with different operational processes. In this way, by using questionnaires and surveys, managers may accumulate reliable statistical data that would significantly facilitate decision-making.

Popular qualitative research methods include focus group interviews. Interviews allow marketing executives to obtain valuable and detailed information. Caemmerer and Wilson (2010) suggest that, along with customer feedback assessment, it is useful to interview employee focus groups as well; in this way, organisational learning and employee commitment to quality initiatives can drastically increase.

The quality of service delivery depends on employee-customer relations. Thus, market-driven companies frequently use analysis of customer feedback and strive to integrate the consequently developed understanding of customer needs into corporate culture through knowledge management activities (Taddese & Osada 2011).

Ooi (2015) considers that the main areas of knowledge management are acquisition (creation), dissemination (sharing) and implementation of knowledge. Systematic knowledge management is aimed at the integration of achieved customer understanding into business processes and, in this way, fosters organisational learning in the improvement of performance quality (Tang, Chen & Wu 2010). Knowledge management is important because it ensures comprehension of customer preferences at the level of individual employees.

The ability to manage business operations in a way that fosters the generation and sharing of knowledge becomes a great competitive advantage. To achieve efficient knowledge management, a company needs to enhance organisational communication patterns, and develop an adequate context for the creation of knowledge and its dissemination across multiple organisational levels (Colurcio 2009). It is observed that along with improvement of service quality, customer focus and customer relationship practices support the creation of more extensive knowledge of the new product development process (Tang et al. 2010).

Comprehension of customer perceptions across multiple levels within the organisation is thus highly beneficial, as it leads to the refinement of strategic planning procedures and performance improvement. At the same time, when a company’s internal operations are enhanced and well-planned, it leads to an increase in stakeholders’ (business partners, customers, employees) satisfaction (Chen, Wang & Yang 2009). In this way, stakeholders’ satisfaction becomes a significant indicator of organisational success, and by measuring customer feedback and other quality indicators, applying knowledge management and developing customer-oriented culture, enterprises increase competitiveness and obtain an opportunity to surpass rivals in the market.

Figure 1: Table of customer focus practices in TQM organisations

Discussion

Analysis

It is possible to say that customer-oriented strategic goals are derived from the superior organisational mission, values and objectives. Additionally, for the successful accomplishment of TQM tasks, companies need to adjust their strategic customer satisfaction goals with the overall organisational aims and vision. This means that the customer focus principle should become embodied in a systematic process of market information analysis, development of customer understanding, coordination of knowledge at every level of organisational operations and integration of customer values into daily work activities. Customer orientation, driven by the profound understanding of customers’ desires, is a prerequisite for the development and consequent implementation of adequate customer relationship practices. Therefore, the creation of customer focus value may be regarded as a major customer-related activity.

Customer focus practices include a variety of activities exercised to gain information about customer expectations and achieve customer understanding. Customer behaviour is a dynamic phenomenon, and the course of its evolution largely depends on the social, economic and overall environmental situation. When a company’s employees understand their customers’ situation, they become more efficient in the creation of product values according to actual customer needs.

Consumers tend to purchase products which not merely can fulfil their physiological needs, but will also contribute to individual self-realization and identification (Cassia et al. 2015). Thus, products may be regarded as expressions of personality, and the brands that can understand customers’ personal needs for self-expression gain the opportunity to attract more potential consumers.

Knowledge management is an efficient tool for the integration of gathered information and customer understanding into routine business operations and ensures that every individual employee exercises EMs’ core values. In this way, knowledge management may be regarded as an essential customer focus practice in TQM.

Viewpoints

The findings of the literature review demonstrate that customer focus is the major business value embedded in all EMs around the world. Orientation to people is a social value, and by considering social needs or the interests of particular groups of users/customers, a firm shows its responsiveness to basic human values, and it helps to strengthen the organisational appeal and attract new customers.

The customer focus principle is exercised through customer relationship practices, evaluation of feedback and organisational knowledge management activities that contribute to the dissemination of valuable information across an organisation. It appears that all mentioned practices are interrelated, and the regularity and consistency of their execution are rooted in the overall organisational culture. Customer-oriented corporate philosophy and politics influence employees’ commitment to improvement in the quality of service and products. Knowledge management can be regarded as a cohesive element between actual performance and employees’ motives and perceptions of their functions and responsibilities. Culture as a complex of shared customer focus values within a company allows managers to implement TQM in a more efficient way. Also, when these values and standards are equally accepted across all organisational levels, a company succeeds in the development of desirable professional behaviours that ultimately result in attainment of greater customer satisfaction and excellent quality of service.

Future Directions and Recommendations

Multiple quantitative and qualitative measurement tools help enterprises to gain information on consumers’ perceptions and needs. However, the main challenge for companies in the alignment of their own organisational perspectives on product development and the products themselves with customer perceptions and views. For the achievement of greater business excellence and alignment of business performance to EMs’ principles of conduct, organisations need to consider the customer focus principle in the development of strategic plans.

The customer-focused organisational mission, vision and values, priorities and goals are vital for quality improvement, and moreover, it is possible to call customer service a central element of TQM programmes. Therefore, TQM companies should strive to integrate operational processes with customer focus values and make an effort to plan the allocation of informational, financial and human resources for the enhancement of customer service delivery and employee-customer interactions.

Conclusion

Service quality is associated with customer satisfaction, which has a positive effect on organisational sustainability and success. The customer focus principle is the major driver of customer value creation, which can help to increase the perception of products and services. Major customer-oriented TQM practices include communicating with consumers and accumulating feedback through surveys and interviews, as well as considering customer views in product development. At the same time, knowledge management helps organisations to adjust strategies towards basic TQM success factors and customer perspectives and to share common cultural elements – beliefs, values and visions – among all employees.

A large body of research is devoted to the analysis of TQM and customer focus’ favourable impact on organisations. Positive financial results, increase in productivity, strengthening of competitive position and acquisition of competencies and non-tangible benefits are among the advantages gained through the implementation of customer focus strategies (Kumar et al. 2009; Talib et al. 2011; Jung et al. 2009).

As stated by Su et al. (2010), ‘Outputs to customers start with customisation, satisfaction and trust, then gain more by customers’ loyalty’ (p. 84). In this way, it is possible to say that customer satisfaction is a short-term effect of customer focus practices, while customer commitment or loyalty are the long-term effects. Customer loyalty is the major prerequisite of financial performance’s stability, profitability and brand recognition. Thus, by practising customer focus principles, organisations gain benefits in multiple dimensions of business performance.

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Introduction

Total quality management is a variation of lean manufacturing principles that originated in Japan. Toyota Production System first developed them. Over the years, the concepts have morphed into various business tools, including the TQM that is now a comprehensive tool used by almost all major firms in the Western world.

TQM incorporates customer satisfaction, continuous improvement, and workforce commitment (Lai, Lui & Hon 2014). The following are achievable with adequate total quality management implementation in a firm.

First, the firm will strengthen its competitive position, have high productivity, enhance its market image, increase its profitability, and ensure that employees have job security. These and other results depend on the nature of TQM implementation and the business sector.

A question concerning implementation is whether it contributes to better functioning of other tools and whether TQM leads to the desired results. Additional queries may relate to whether the business in question is also reaping sustainable benefits.

Xerox case

This section now examines the application of TQM in Xerox Corporation. Familiarity with Xerox and research on the company through secondary literature sources informs the analysis. Among multinational Western firms, Xerox is one of the most quality conscious one.

It began implementing TQM in 1980. The company develops its TQM practices to respond to changes in its business environment and to shape its operations to enjoy a competitive advantage.

Company background

The firm started operations in 1906 in the USA. Five decades later, it had made its first plain paper copier. Its profit growth was 20 per cent annually by the start of the 21^st century (Xerox 2004). Stock prices for the public company soared.

However, its company’s growth nosedived soon afterwards. Its stock price fell from a high of USD 70 in 1999 to less than USD 5 in 2001. During the period, the company lost USD 30 billion as market value (Xerox 2004).

Worldwide, Xerox has a reputation to uphold, as the world’s best photocopier manufacturer. Its success is a demonstration of right management principles, tool usage, and positive sustainable outcomes.

Implementation of TQM at Xerox began as a reaction to the negative market performance. The company lost about 65 percent of market share in the 1980s and was moving towards obsolescence. It needed to change its strategies and once again become dominant in the market.

At the time, key sources of competition were Japanese manufacturers that were embracing a low cost market strategy to upset incumbent rivals like Xerox in the general electronics and office equipment markets. Although Japanese copiers were very affordable for most businesses, they did not compromise on quality, which made them irresistible to customers.

Xerox copiers at the time were of high quality, but costs of production were very high, such that cutting prices would translate to company losses.

Main findings

The introduction of TQM was a change of tactic that would seek to ensure that Xerox copiers curve out a new niche market segment and fulfil consumer preferences. Xerox opted to go for a quality edge, instead of being fixated on prices and finding ways to produce cheaper products than competitors do.

Its new value proposition would be to attain leadership through quality. Xerox would leap ahead of the innovation curve and defend its brand image. It would grow its reputation by designing well-functioning and long lasting products.

Additionally, the company was also looking at maintaining long-term relationships with customers. It would only achieve this feat through adequate quality management. Research on TQM benefits in company shows that having TQM is not an end in itself. Firms also have to embrace the critical features and principles that promote TQM implementation for them to maximise its benefits (Fawcett et al. 2014).

Employee commitment

The goal of TQM at Xerox is to manage for results. This applies to all operations of the firm. The company wants to have production improvements and revenue increases consistently. It relies on the management of quality as its main strategy.

To achieve its success, the company used TQM principles to make changes in the way it does business and relates to customers, suppliers, and employees. Today, Xerox is back to its glorious past, where it commands a substantial market share in printing and document production business globally. It has the support of employees and customers and its revenue and returns on investment are high.

The company realized that suppliers, including employees as labour suppliers, were sources of quality compromises. It also noticed the spread of resources when dealing with many independent suppliers for specific production components became less efficient than collective dealings.

As a remedy, it consolidated manufacturing facilities so that it would only deal with groups of suppliers. It made economic sense, as group relations afforded Xerox economies of scale and gave it a bargaining power in negotiations, as it could easily take advantage of intra competition among suppliers.

Most importantly, groups of suppliers lowered the cost of quality implementation. With suppliers organized into a group, the company could organize supplier relationship systems to undertake quality inspections and lower its overhead costs by eliminating marginal costs in procurement, inspection, shipping, and supply management.

Moreover, consolidation meant that Xerox now had a manageable small supplier base. Its task of increasing employee empowerment also became achievable after the renewed focus. It was able to extend monitoring systems to the suppliers and assume a better position that allowed the firm know in advance when a problem arises.

With few overheads in supply and a low number of suppliers, employee requirement for Xerox in the manufacturing and supply management remains low.

Continuous improvement results

When Xerox was losing money in 2001, it was still implementing TQM; however, a change in the external environment meant that the company’s production strategy was no longer viable. Photocopiers were turning digital and Xerox was still stuck in the analogue world.

After the decline, the company retaliated with its digital production press for the production market. It also enhanced its office product line to include digital copiers and printers. The company worked towards increasing its revenue and reducing costs so that it would offset the losses encountered prior to the year 2004.

Performance over the last decade has been promising, which shows that the tactics used by the firm paid off. Its financial performance for the last few years has been positive, with promises for future revenue growth (Xerox 2014).

Other than the shortcomings of failing to catch up with technological trends, Xerox has made considerable efforts to be at par with customer demands and environmental threshold capabilities. In addition to photocopiers, the company offers LCD monitors, printers, large volume digital printers, workflow software, and other office productivity software.

The company relies on benchmarking, as it works towards sustaining its competitive advantages. This is a process of improving towards, and considering best practices (Xerox 2014). Benchmarking can be of different types, such as strategic, process, functional, internal, external, and international.

Each type has a different aim and scope of comparison. Benchmarking is a multiple step process that begins with planning and the data collection, which precede analysis and reporting. After that, the firm makes changes based on the report (Rani, Duhan & Deshwal 2012).

After initial market troubles, Xerox benchmarked its operations against Japanese companies. Xerox realised that it takes twice as long to produce compared to Japanese competitors. At the same time, the number of technical staff needed by Xerox for the same production process was almost five times higher than the number used by Japanese firms.

For example, there would be five more engineers at Xerox than at its competitor, and they would all develop similar products. The company also experienced design changes that were four times higher than the competitors. Consequently, it spent more on design costs, with figures being three times more than the competitors.

As Xerox manufactured goods, Japanese firms had already sold them to the market. They were fast, low cost, and high quality at a retail price that was equal to the manufacturing cost at Xerox. Xerox had over 30,000 defective parts per million due to the inherent inefficiencies and the lack of quality management.

This was 30 times more than what competitors reported. After finding out its bad position against the competitors, the company opted to follow the benchmarking process to achieve similar results and surpass the competitors in some aspects of its operations.

In planning stages, it came up with the features for benchmarking. In addition, it had to come up with an appropriate data collection method to facilitate effective capturing of information for subsequent decision-making. Xerox evaluated the rivals’ strength against its strength as part of the analysis.

Once it made tangible analysis, it moved on to the step of integration. In this step, necessary goals were put into the overall company planning process. Action steps came later and they included the implementation of established plans. Moreover, the company checked whether the goals that were set were being realized. It also assessed its maturity to determine its position in the market.

The suppliers who served Xenon were about five thousand, while those of most Japanese firms were about one thousand. It reduced the number to 500. It was also realized that Xenon’s rivals offered the vendors skills in quality control, among other areas. To match up, Xerox opted to introduce a vendor certification process.

It consisted of training suppliers and then certifying them and establishing partnerships that would provide a means of telling them the areas for improvement. Xenon informed the vendors about the changes that were undertaken in the bid to enhance customer experience. This ensured that the firm became proficient in supplier management and was able to increase overall quality of the business unit consistently.

Xenon got rid of inventory bottlenecks caused by excess capacity, or non-matching customer orders and production stocking levels as part of inventory management. A key indicator of performance improvement was the capital cycle period. The company also minimized its inventory carrying cost.

With smart document management solutions, the firm allowed customers to shift to an on-demand model for producing documents. The method retained quality and saved in inventory costs for customers and Xerox (Xerox 2004).

The manufacturing system recognizes internal customers like assembly line workers and external customers like the end users. The people at Xerox connect to customers and their businesses. Relationships between employees and customers or the firm are personalised (Xerox 2004).

With product innovation, the company has come up with new ways of enhancing the functionality of its main products to reduce damage and waste so that they are more beneficial to client businesses. For example, the firm develops smart packaging products that can track temperature and relay consumption information with every opening.

They act as additional information collection centres for the company and fulfil customer needs for better functional designs (Xerox 2014).

Customer satisfaction

On customers, a philosophy of being oriented to customer demands drives Xerox’s strategy. Here, manufacturing goals have a quality aspect, in addition to being quantity based, because of firm performance targets. The current goal is to ensure that customer interaction with Xerox at any point is rewarding to both parties.

Points of interaction include Xerox copiers, employees, and marketing campaigns. The company seeks to have all activities meet high quality standards, such that it does not have to worry about customers interacting with any of the company aspects and finding out there are poor quality elements. Thus, customer satisfaction encompasses everything that the company does internally and externally.

The realization of customer satisfaction goals is a management task. In addition, the company continues to move elements of its production-based strategies to customer based ones (Xerox 2014).

Achieving the customer satisfaction feat comes with a full dedication of all members of the organization to be considerate of the market and be alert about opportunities for improvement. Entrepreneurship shows in the spirit of employees, while personal initiative ensures that there are incremental changes that enhance the overall quality of the company tradition, customer relationship, and product features at all levels of the organization (Sikdar & Payyazhi, 2014).

Customer satisfaction goals continue to be key pillars of quality of the company. The firm continues to invest in other businesses that are likely to increase its value creation for customers. Rather than offer standalone products, Xerox now takes part in integrating its office and production systems, together with clients and their end users for both public and private customers.

The company is now moving towards being a service-led company. It provides products, but it also enhances their utility and fulfils customer needs by making the customer part of an overall process of designing and solving needs. Thus, the company has to constantly add new features and eliminate the challenges that relate to service delivery.

A key indicator for its success is the rate of contract renewals for managing services that it provides. The year 2013 saw a 92 per cent increase in business processes and IT outsourcing business (Xerox 2014). The company also retained its global leadership in digital technology products. Service revenues for the firm were only 24 per cent of its total revenue in 2009. In 2013, they made up 55 per cent of total revenue (Rani, Duhan & Deshwal 2012).

Discussion

According to Rani, Duhan and Deshwal (2012), the gains made by Xerox, such as the reported reduction in supplied parts defects by the early 1990s, are attributable to the robustness of TQM applications. Today, TQM can serve both private and public organizations, with equal gains expected.

The focus of quality refers to meeting the expectations of customers and financial stakeholders. It can extend to meet societal needs and personnel needs. As much as the basic definition of quality has remained the same over the last few decades, understanding has undergone an evolution. In its original foundation, TQM aims to discourage reactions and promotes planning and production.

It favours first-time prevention, instead of inspection and conformance to requirements. Looking at Xerox, success came because management was committed and offered a storing top-to-bottom support. The company held a strong customer focus in its internal and external processes.

The entire Xerox workforce was, and continues to be part of TQM implementation. Business improvement is happening in a continuous manner, while the firm is becoming more innovative in its production. Lastly, the company opted to treat its suppliers as partners.

It involves them in its long-term plans and accommodates their needs in its strategic plans to ensure that high quality production remains sustainable. Success at Xerox was achieved by focusing on information. The question was about what the firm could do with knowledge of its internal processes and the competition.

Although the company embraces technology, it only does so when the underlying information makes economic sense. Continuous improvement and employee empowerment are features of TQM. Achieving perfection may not be possible in a dynamic business setting.

Nevertheless, organizations need to improve their performance recurrently to enjoy compounded effects of growth, development, and efficiency. On the other hand, employee empowerment is recognition of the internal customer of the organization and the first public relations officer.

Under this feature, a firm lets employees suggest changes and spot problems in production. Forthcoming employees receive rewards, instead of punishment. Process management and product design are also features of TQM.

They relate to the quality of source materials being determined before processing or production commences and the ability of a product to meet customer needs based on its functions, usage, and practicality respectively. A firm has to make sure that suppliers offer same quality practices to it so that time for inspection and resources used for verification of quality standards remain minimal.

With product design, a firm seeks to put customer preferences into technical requirements of products, such that product performance in the market experiences grows.

Issues of TQM

Coming up with a comprehensive implementation of total quality management in a firm needs total commitment from the staff. With participation of every member of the firm and their commitment, some TQM features may remain unachievable. In addition, the level of commitment and participation differs among the hierarchical levels of the organization.

An important thing is to have the management staff doing more as both workers and mentors to influence expected behaviour and the attitude of the junior staff (Sikdar & Payyazhi, 2014). Once the staff exhibit commitment, an additional step is to have a company-wide improvement process.

Here, the basic feature is measurement of performance, and then implementing new or existing strategies to increase the performance and achieve new benchmarks. Monitoring ensures that a firm is in touch with its features of TQM, such that improvements and corrections to problems happen immediately upon the identification of a need.

The determination to push forward with the changes brought by TQM is important. Demanding continuous improvement may not be straightforward and comfortable, but this is what overall success requires. Consequently, a firm’s leadership may have to look into attaining high satisfaction levels for all the organizational members as part of the collective strive to gain firm-level triumph.

While implementing and fostering commitment is critical, there is also a heightened need for quality, which is the principle factor within TQM. Quality is a measure of excellence in processes, products, interactions, relationships, and strategies of a firm (Cronholm & Salomonson 2014).

Any features of poor quality undermine overall gains that a firm makes towards being a preferred organization to work in and a fierce competitor. Quality achievement comes at a cost. To gain good quality, a firm has to use resources and adopt a specific tactic to avoid consequences of poor quality.

At the same time, if a firm has poor quality, then the cost suffered in terms of missed opportunities and declining business prospects is the problem that it will have to deal with. Thus, a firm must evaluate whether prevention, appraisal, and implementation costs of TQM are appropriate investments and whether their returns is higher than the lack of initiative, which reverts a firm back to its initial losing position.

Among prevention costs incurred by most firms are procurement inspection, quality training, design, machine inspection, field testing, sampling, and monitoring along the supply chain (Azadi, Farzipoor & Hosseinzadeh 2014).

TQM is applicable to all activities undertaken by an organization. The improvements achieved help to increase opportunities and efficiencies of other non-related sections of the organization. For example, improvement in procurement inspection lessens the demand for process inspection and allows an organization to reallocate resources and maintain agility towards changing business environments.

On the customer side, satisfaction is the product of quality management. The same achievements are possible for suppliers. The essential thing is that performance enhances across the organization, affecting all its business processes and stakeholders (Eltantawy, Giunipero & Handfield 2014).

Quality costs narrow down to prevention, appraisal, and avoidance of failure. Taking precaution is expensive, but not taking it can be more expensive for a firm; therefore, it is a necessary cost. The same is true for appraisal costs, which relate to the expense paid to detect flaws in quality across the entire firm’s spectrum.

Appraisal costs will include the funds used to perform in-house checks, together with those paid to third-party inspectors. It will also include the time and other non-monetary resources used by the firm to achieve its total quality management.

Future of workforce commitment and continuous improvement at Xerox

As Xerox focuses on service delivery as its next area of growth, it increases demand for expertise, employee citizenship behaviour, and quality control of its employees and business partners’ staff. Determination of quality at a service level is the same as that of a physical product.

For example, the number of defects is not as countable in a service, as they are in a physical product. Sometimes, errors in service delivery and customer relations compound and take time to reveal. Setting standards and conforming to them when the product is intangible is problematic.

Xerox meets the service delivery challenge by emphasizing on information gathering and knowledge sharing (Xerox 2014). Xerox can control the manner of delivering services to clients by integrating suppliers, employees, and customers in its plans and their execution, such as review of designs and inventory management.

With this approach, it is possible to learn about mistakes and eliminate them in collaboration with clients to prevent the loss of business (Mosadeghrad, 2014). Some aspects of TQM at Xerox are not as visible as they were two decades ago when the process was initiated at the firm.

Today, quality management has become part of an ongoing tradition. Benchmarking may not reflect the competition in isolation, but it integrates with customer and employee features. The blurring line of business partners and customers also makes information differentiation from competitors and customer preferences difficult and may pose a challenge for data analysis for the company (Moskovkin, Bocharova & Balashova 2014).

Conclusion

The implementation of TQM at Xerox has been one of the reasons for sustained success over the last few decades. At the same time, incidences of company poor performance at the end of the 20^th century show that TQM is only advantageous when it also ensures that the firm remains agile to changing business environment conditions.

The findings from a review of Xerox show that the firm is moving towards being a service-oriented company. Many of its success strategies were based on manufacturing. As a global business, service delivery has a number of challenges. Nevertheless, the adoption of quality control benchmarks and insisting on employee empowerment ensure that the firm’s service oriented strategy is paying off.

Reference List

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Introduction

Total quality management (TQM) is a philosophical framework that involves constant control and improvement of the quality of products, services, and processes. Quality improvement concerns each person engaged into the development and consumption of products and services that a business firm offers.

TQM is premised on four major pillars – management, suppliers, workforce, suppliers, and customers. All these premises take control of supply and demand level, as well as customer satisfaction with products and services. The main task of an organization is either to meet or exceed consumer expectations.

TQM involves nine major practices. These are cross-functional product design, information and feedback, process management, customer and employee involvement, supplier quality management, committed leadership, cross-functional planning, and strategic planning.

All these dimensions are confined to proper human resource management, organizational learning and development, and readiness to introduce constant innovation and technological advancement. In addition, TQM is also connected with Six Sigma, a new concept that also involves both quantitative and qualitative dimensions of carrying steps of quality management.

Thesis Statement

Total quality management is a complex notion covering human, product, and technological process as the basic dimensions leading to constant improvement of the quality of services and products.

Main discussion

Human Dimension of Total Quality Management

Quality management practices are applied in many business organizations because it contributes to the success and organizational performance. However, inappropriate implementation of strategies and resources can lead to failures in improving the quality of products and services because of a number of factors. The failures can be result of improper top management and leadership commitment, lack of employee involvement and underestimation of customer capacity in improving the quality.

Committed Leadership

Every top leadership and management will deal with implementing quality management strategies because it brings in greater benefits and profits. What is more important is that leaders of business organizations should express their full commitment and loyalty to each member of the employed environment.

The importance of leadership in an organization is especially emphasized because it influences the actual process of constant improvement and development. Samuel (2004) writes, “leadership is influencing the people so that all of them do the right things, the right way at the right time, willingly…so that the organization grows and the purpose is fulfilled” (p. 220).

In contrast, the role of managers is to follow the procedures in a right way and adhere to the established standards. Their responsibilities do not go beyond the accepted norms. Hence, effective leadership should be influential for employees to adhere to behavioral patterns that leaders use. Leaders, therefore, should have specific moral values and extreme feeling of accountability, particularly during the time of changes and crises.

Leadership commitment of top managers is revealed through their highly responsible attitude to the welfare of their subordinates who also influence greatly the quality of delivered products and services. In addition, top management should also be responsible for defining the vision, mission and value system of a company, as well as for formulating the strategic plan. Operating resources and personnel effectively is also among the main goals that leaders should undertake.

Employee Involvement

Employee involvement is a part of a business organizations strategy of total involvement of all departments and spheres. Along with supplier management and customer engagement, employee involvement also contributes to the organizational growth, as well as to maintaining favorable relations among employees, customers, and suppliers.

Total employee involvement lies in both top management and the way managers copes with its employees. The main concept of total quality management should bind both top management and subordinates to a single objective in order to create “a united force totally involved in achieving organizational goals and objectives” (Mukherjee, 2006, p. 173). An advanced form of employee engagement is employees’ empowerment.

In this respect, employee engagement is possible in case of total employee empowerment that permits employees to take measures and react to customer needs and expectation. Quality of products and services is also the main concern of employees (Mukherjee, 2006). In this respect, employees should strive to align their objectives with higher organizational goals; they should also have an authority to increase their contribution by maximizing the available opportunities and taking proper measures to meet the organizational purpose.

Customer Involvement

A business organization having no objective and missions will not succeed in producing quality goods and achieving high rates of performance and profitability. In fact, organization should realize the importance of introducing customer focus. Exploring consumer needs and concerns is the first step toward the production optimization. In order to create customer orientation, it is, first of all, necessary to consider the organizational structure.

Absence of quality objective, the department goals will come to the forth and, as a result, the organization will not be able to follow common goals. Change to a vertical structure will blur the boundaries between the departments and unite them in their attempts to achieve common goals. Specific attention should be given to the link between the marketing department and the production department that should establish fruitful cooperation and interaction.

Customer focus creation should proceed with the introduction of the idea of ‘internal customer’ (Mukherjee, 2006). The concept is confined to the idea of introducing process as relations between product and customer. For instance, “marketing becomes internal customer for the production department, which in turn becomes the internal customer for the materials, human resources and maintenance department” (Mukherjee, 2006, 2005).

Hence, the shift in evaluation the production process permits the managements to achieve customer satisfaction. In this respect, to meet customer needs, it is necessary to produce goods and services “…that are of right quality, in right quantity and made available at the right time, right place, and at the right price” (Mukherjee, 2006, p. 150).

Within this context, the idea of internal customer becomes beneficial for the business organization because it successfully meets two objectives – fulfills the marketing functions and provides necessary customer orientation.

Supplier Quality Management

As soon as the product has been manufactured, the question of distribution comes to the forth. Supplier quality management, therefore, is the next step in improving quality of produced goods and services. Managers and employees should give especial attention to this production link because suppliers can provide them with valuable knowledge and experience concerning place and terms of deliver.

The role of supplier should not be underestimated as it influences the competing position of a firm in a business environment. Supplier is also involved into the deliver of the materials that will be used in manufacturing goods and, therefore, the choice of suppliers is indispensible for ensuring the highest quality. The significance of including supplier in a production chain is enormous because this entity is endowed with a great number of responsibilities.

For instance, supplier is liable for tracking the material costs that are implemented at various stages of production. Much responsibility is also imposed on suppliers in terms of information exchange between customer and organization. The quality of information flow, therefore, depends largely on the suppliers’ awareness.

Product Dimension of Total Quality Management

Process Management

Process is an inherent component of successful organization’s functioning, along with people, structure, and control mechanisms. In this respect, process management is another important dimension of total quality management that consists in fulfilling activities leading to desired outcomes.

Process management also involves means and techniques assisting to the accomplishment of organization’s goals. Finally, process management allows organization to deliver and create value for a customer (Madison, 2005, p. 2). Workflow and information exchange are regarded as the basic processes taking place at an organization.

Control mechanism also shape the part of process management. They involve mechanical, electrical, and statistical procedures that allow the employees to measure and enhance the quality of products. The importance of control mechanism in process management lies in the necessity of introducing changes to the production process, as well as to the control mechanism itself. Finally, process analysis is an effective way to diagnose the performance and define the gaps in the production process.

Cross-Functional Product Design

The development of a new product design is also a part of total quality management. This process is accomplished through gathering cross-functional team working on single product development. Cooperative work performance, therefore, positively contributes to the development of new product design (Sorli & Stokic, 2009).

It is also important for a team to involve members from different department to provide an in-depth evaluation of the proposed product, including customer needs, organizational capacity, cost effectiveness, and potential revenues received from selling the product (Sorli & Stokic, 2009). Research and development can be regarded as another integral component of successful cross-functional product design.

Product design and development should always be associated with constant improvement and innovation. Designers should engage their theoretical knowledge and experience to integrate into creating a product that would meet customer requirements and increase organizational goals (Sorli & Stokic, 2009). More importantly, they should rely heavily on the external environment and competitive environment.

Organizational Processes and Role of Total Quality Management

Information and Feedback

Effective leadership and management should rely on effective interaction, information and feedback system. Managers should be able to successfully communicate with their subordinates and apply to a reward system to encourage employees increase organizational capacity. Importantly, feedback received from various stakeholders is also crucial for introducing the corresponding changing to the marketing and production process (Rawlins, 2008).

Finally, external customer feedback provides a better picture of market potential, as well as supply and demand rates of a launched product. Marketing department should be concerned with the accurate and responsive information exchange between other department to make sure that all problems, gaps, and pitfalls have been taken into consideration before a new product line is launched.

Establishing effective communication system is another important dimension of total quality managers that ensures constant control of information input and processing (Rawlins, 2008). Managers and employees should be encouraged to draw as much new information about potential markets and customer to be able to introduce changed to the manufacturing process and increase the organizational performance.

Strategic Planning

Developing a strict mission, vision, and philosophy provide an organization with accurate directions and solutions to improvement and high performance.

In order to properly evaluate the position of a business firm, specific attention should be given to understanding its current position through diagnosing its perspectives for future development. The key components of strategic planning, therefore, include mission, vision, values and strategy. Each of the components is of high significance for the adequate and stable development of an organization.

Strategic planning should also involve analysis and synthesis of information received from customers. The information can reveal both negative and positive experience of customers to define which elements of the production process should be changed. Therefore, strategic planning should always be in a state of constant development and improvement.

According to Mukherjee (2006), “the strategic quality plan bridges the gap between where the organization is and where it wants to reach in the long run” (p. 139). In this respect, the mission of the organization is closely associated with its value system whereas the vision is regarded as a long-term objective of the organization. In addition, vision should be SMART, namely, “specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time bound” (Mukherje, 2006, p. 139).

The next step of strategic planning involves identification of target audience that will allow the organization to reach its goals. In this respect, the strategic planning process should involve assessment of customers’ needs to define how well the organization can meet these needs. The effectiveness of strategic planning will influence on the total quality management in a business organization.

Cross-Functional Planning

Synthesis of cross-functional activities is an important dimension of total quality management of product and services due to the greater commitment to customer needs and concerns. In particular, isolated work of advertising, promotion, research and development, and marketing department does not provide company with a competitive advantage over other business organizations because it will hamper the cooperation between managers.

In this respect, cross-functional planning involves horizontal exchange of information between managers (Shultz et al., 2009). Well-organized work and interaction between the departments can contribute to immediate response to customer supply and demand rates, as well as integrating new concepts and strategies on improving the overall quality of organizations’ production.

Six Sigma: Practices, Experience, and Methods

Six Sigma is an advanced concept of total quality management in business organization that implies both qualitative and quantitative methods of evaluating the production success and customer demands. Its orientation on improvement and development, as well as constant innovation is possible through measuring the existing numerical and qualitative data, as well as predicting possible outcomes of specifically implemented strategies.

The concept of Six Sigma differs a bit from the total quality management because its focus is made on the analysis of possible errors, defects, and pitfalls that organization might face while implementing a specific product line. In statistical terms, Six Sigma denotes “…standard deviation, a statistical measurement of variation, the exceptions to expected outcomes” (Thomsett, 2005, p. 6). The idea of Six Sigma takes its roots at Motorola company in the 1980s and was introduced by Mikel Harry.

The engineer started examining variation in outcomes and company’s internal processes; he soon realized that measuring variations made it possible to advance the working systems (Thomsett, 2005). The procedures sought to change procedures in order to improve the overall performance for a long-term period. In a few years, the Six Sigma concept became popular among other recognized companies.

Six Sigma prioritizes cost savings because they shape an important element of quality control, which should guarantee effective, permanent, and rewarding quality activities (Thomsett, 2005). Cost-effectiveness, however, should be congruent with the development of effective workforce potential that would enhance the organizational performance through creativity and innovation.

Overall, the presented strategy is aimed at achieving excellent in quality service, as well as at measuring possible deviation from the idea. It also provides perspectives for adding value to a product of service. Therefore, the concept of Six Sigma is sophisticated and technical complex.

Conclusion

Total quality management (TQM) embraces a complex unity of processes, targets, and stages and is aimed at enhancing the overall organization’s potential, as well as constant improving and innovation. Therefore, the given discipline covers a number of dimensions, including human resources, organizational learning and development, and product design. All these dimensions are crucial for development of an extensive quality management network.

Specifically, human dimension consists in full leadership commitment, employee training and engagement, customer orientation, and supplier quality management. Product design focuses on the cross-functional product design and process management. Finally, organizational structure deals with such elements as strategic planning, cross-functional planning, and information and feedback control.

Aside from the presented dimensions, TQM introduces new models and techniques in sustaining quality of product and services, including the concept of Six Sigma, which involves identification of possible errors and defects of product manufacture that can be eliminated for a long-term period.

References

Madison, D. (2005). Process Mapping, Process Improvement, and Process Management: A Practical Guide for Enhancing Work and Information Flow. US: Paton Professional.

Mukherjee, P. N. (2006). Total Quality Management. US: PHI Learning.

Rawlins, R. A. (2008). Total Quality Management (TQM). US: AuthorHouse.

Samuel, L. S. A. (2004). Total Quality Management. US: PHI Learning.

Shultz, D. E., Barnes, B. E., Shultz, H. F., and Azzaro, M. (2009). Building Customer-Brand Relationships. US: M. E. Sharpe.

Sorli, M., & Stokic, D. (2009). Innovating in Product/Process Development: Gaining in New Product Development. US: Springer.

Thomsett, M. C. (2005). Getting Started in Six Sigma. US: John Wiley & Sons.