Question

Mazlina ventures into agriculture business. She firmly believe that there is market opportunity and demand for organic vegetables provided quality is assured. Even though her business is small, but over the past two years, her company has been exporting fresh organic vegetables to Singapore.

However, there have two main issues that troubled her.

First, there has been a perception that local small medium scale should not waste time to have their company to be ISO certified. ISO has a range of standards for quality management systems that are based on ISO 9001 and adapted to specific sectors and industries. Likewise, there is no reason that agriculture company cannot be ISO qualified. Mazlina is still undecided whether to certify her company with ISO9001:2015 or stay with current status quo. Obviously, she may understand the benefits of an ISO certified company.

Second, there has been issues related to cost. She has strong quality commitment. She maintained a stringent standard operating procedure that each of the organic shipment is thoroughly inspected. In fact, unknowingly she could have overengineered the inspection process. As a result, the cost of producing the vegetables has increased over last 5 months, eroding her margin. In addition, there has been increased of employee turnover. Additional cost was incurred to rehire and retrain all these employees where she wanted them to specialize in the inspection process. There has been a cost of quality with all the additional effort.

Question 1 - Evaluate Mazlina’s options on the quality certification.

Question 2 - What are the categories of cost of quality? Did Mazlina approach in managing quality appropriate and optimal? Provide recommendations.

Answer 1

Answer 1:

The quality management principles are (a) customer focus, (b) leadership; (c) engagement of people; (d) process approach; (e) improvement; (f) evidence based decision making & (g) relationship management

The application of the process approach in a quality management system enables:

(a) understanding and consistency in meeting the requirement

(b) the consideration of processes in terms of added value

(c) the achievement of effective process performance

(d) improvement of processes based on evaluation of data & information

In Mazlina's case, the consistency is required in delivering the products to the customers. From her strong commitment in quality, Mazlina has incorporated stringent quality checks in the product. She has to opt for quality certification, if there is a requirement of a certification to do business in Singapore. Otherwise , with the adherance of the stringent quality checks, she can do away with the ISO certifications.

Answer 2:

There are two categories of the cost of quality (a) cost of good quality & (b) cost of poor quality

Cost of good quality is attributed to prevention & appraisal, resulting in the increase of business

Cost of poor quality results in internal & external failures.

Mazlina's approach in managing the quality is what the customers are looking for. With this approach, she will be able to find a niche market for the products and I strongly recommend this approach.