Question

This week you will explore Quality systems, quality control, inspection, quality tools, and quality management. Your assignment this week is to first choose an industry segment with which you are familiar. That business can be the one in which you are employed or are familiar with with such as: airline transportation; food services; retail outlets; pharmacies, medical or dental services; or any other business you are familiar with. Once you have decide on an industry segment (not a company), research online the following questions:

What factors are important to a high quality product or service in this industry segment?

What quality problems or issues has this industry had challenges with in the past?

How does this industry generally manage the quality of products and services?

What are your general perceptions of the quality of products and services in this industry segment?  

This is not an opinion piece, this is a research forum, please limit your observations, insights, and opinions to the last part of your posting.

Answer 1

The business I would choose to explore the quality system is from Media and Entertainment sector namely Zee Entertainment. Zee is an Indian media house, part of Essel group, and has multiple channels across various countries. It is one of the most prominent network channels in India. In addition to TV, they also have extensive interest in broadcast, internet apps, OTT, print media, films and theaters.

To understand the quality system at Media house, it is vital to understand the supply chain in media industry. The programs are created by Production houses in coordination with programming teams, part of Zee and they undergo extensive video quality checks before the program goes on air.

For a TV program, quality is to ensure that entire program is available with no loss of audio, color or depth of content. It is quite often possible that audio levels of a file can go beyond the permitted TV levels and such cases can occur even after extensive efforts have been put in for mastering. If the quality team observes that the audio channels are beyond the permitted lower or upper levels, such areas are highlighted and shared back to Production houses for error correction. The same goes for Video corrections. There are multiple areas which can have black spots or color glitches or color bars appearing. There can also be causes of frame freeze which can temporarily make the video seem to be paused. Though these are in milliseconds, Media houses have quality check equipment’s which do a thorough check and ensure that all such areas are highlighted. The channels themselves give out huge penalties to media houses if such issues are not taken care of before program goes on air. For any media house which runs 24 x 7, the quality team have to work round the clock to ensure that such issues are identified are highlighted.

At the end of every month, the issues are consolidated and meetings are done with Production houses to share the month`s performance.

The major aspects of quality from media point of view is to have the right video available at the right time with the right audio and subtitle if applicable. If any of these is out of sync, the entire video may not go on air even though all other aspects may be the best.

In the past, with lack of technological support, all quality check was done manually and there have been multiple cases when program has gone on air with numerous minor issues which get highlighted by end customers and the media houses end up paying a huge amount. Now due to technological advances, this issue has been reduced.

For any media house to be considered as being able to deliver quality content continually, there should not be any case of audio or video glitch in the program which get highlighted by consumers.