Question

The company has had an unrelenting focus on the pursuit of quality. As the company has grown and matured, so too has its approach to managing quality. Benchmarking quality in terms of defect rates against the best high-end Swiss watch-makers was the initial starting point. These quality control processes quickly gave way to quality assurance systems, which have then progressed into industry leading total quality management (TQM) and an incorporation of Kaizen to ensure continuous improvement in the quality of watches at Killer Time. Killer Time has come to set the industry standard for design, craftsmanship and quality –all factors that Mrs Jacobson attributes to the young company being able to steadily increase its market share.

Question: Evaluate the roles of total quality management (TQM) and the Kaizen system of continuous improvement in Killer Time Ltd.

Answer 1

Total quality management is the process of installing the permanent change in the quality of the product and the processes carried out by the organization that can result in the overall improvement of the quality of the products. This is the philosophy in which each and every aspect of the organization is evaluated for any room of improvement and the focus remains on finding the wasteful activities and processes that can delay the production or degrade the quality of the production.

Similarly, kaizen is the philosophy of quality improvement which is carried out with the help of small, on-going positive changes in the processes that are focused on the cooperation and commitment and it is opposite to the conventional top-down approach in which the quality improvement is proposed by the top management.

Both of these methods have really played a significant role in Killer Time Ltd. The company regularly focused on finding out the best possible methods to remove any sort of wastages in the processes and improving the process and quality. Similarly, by providing the free hand to the employees and workers, the company motivated the manpower to look for the possible changes in the process that could result in improvement in product quality.