Question

Chaudary, Zafar and Salman (2015) feel that advocates of TQM consider that improved quality should shrink costs and thus improve financial performance, whilst encouraging a culture which emphasises the prevention of errors as a key feature throughout an organisation.
(a) Discuss how organisations can reduce costs by ensuring that products meet customers’ expectations, while avoiding the costs associated with failing to meet quality targets.

(b) Critically appraise the sentiment in the above statement that in order to reduce costs an organisation must embrace TQM throughout all departments of the company.

Answer 1

(a)

TQM Total qualitty managment system is an integrated comprehensive system of planing and controlling all the business function which meets and exceeds the cstomers needs.

The main objective is to errodicate the waste and improve the efficency.

TQM is a phylosophy of businss behaviour employee improvement,continous improvement  in all areas and customer focus.

The company should adopt the Cost of Quality techiniques for cost reduction which are as follows:

An organization’s CoQ is actually the cost of NOT creating a quality product or service.

• Prevention costs: costs of preparing and implementing a quality plan.
• Appraisal costs: costs of testing, evaluating, and inspecting quality.
• Internal failure costs: costs of scrap, rework and material losses.
• External failure costs: costs of failure at customer site, including returns, repairs and recalls.

Organsiation can reduce the Cost and by ensuring the product that meets the customer expectiations are as follows:

Hiring right people and train them well:

If you don’t have the right people manning your customer care lines, you’re in for big trouble.

Few essential traits that your staff needs to have, including:

• A helpful disposition,
• Strong listening skills,
• High-level cognitive skills to understand and address users’ problems
• Quick decision making capability,
• Ability to pacify irate customer

Identify your custmer problems:

Customers call up your support hotline for a myriad of reasons. It could be anything from solving product issues to maintenance requests.

Proactively eliminate te problems:

Fixing these issues on priority helps improve your customer's overall satisfaction rate with your company. It will also mean fewer repeat calls, shorter call times, and quicker problem resolution, all contributing to a lowering of customer care costs.

Set up self service problem and make them easy to spot:

Customers cite calling call centers and waiting to be served as one of the most irritating things they do in a day. Avoid troubling your customers by offering them information about your product or service upfront.

Consisder remote wrk for customer care agents:

The technology available today can eliminate the need for having all your customer care personnel under one roof. You can build a support team that works from home and is located anywhere in the world at a significantly lower cost than transporting people to your location, paying rent, utilities and other assorted overhead at a permanent commercial property.

Remote workers have been known to put in longer hours, are less stressed out, and are cheaper to maintain than employees in physical offices.

(b)

As already note in the definition of TQM as mention in the first para of answer and the following are the some of factors that we may consisder for reduction in the cost by adopting the TQM throughout the orginisation.

1. Total quality management (TQM) is an ongoing process of detecting and reducing or eliminating errors.
2. It is used to manufacture to streamline supply chain management, improve customer service, and ensure that employees are trained.
3. The focus is to improve the quality of an organization's outputs, including goods and services, through continual improvement of internal practices.
4. Total quality management aims to hold all parties involved in the production process accountable for the overall quality of the final product or service.