Essay: Total quality management, quality assurance and quality control for ETC

Introduction.
In the early 1960’s Engineering Tooling Company (ETC) was set up by a young engineer graduate in North East of England. Due to the increased competition from globalization and the declining rate of engineering from the North East of England, ETC realized that they have to come up with a new strategy to ensure that the nature of business doesn’t get outdated. Soon, the son and daughter of ETC had join the company to follow their father’s footstep and they are keen to give the business a 21st century philosophy. Their new market expended quickly over three years and now ETC is receiving worldwide recognition for its company image and product range. The focus of the assignment is based on three improvement strategy which is Total Quality Management, Quality Assurance and Quality Control. As a newly appointed Quality Manager for the Engineering Tooling Company, the strategy to project itself to customers, suppliers and investors is to implement total quality management, quality assurance and quality control. The aim of total quality management is to reduce defects, increase productivity, improve customer service and innovate. Quality assurance is any efficient procedure of deciding if an item or administration meets indicated prerequisites sets up and maintains set necessities for creating or assembling reliable products. A quality assurance framework is intended to expand client certainty and an organization’s believability, while additionally enhancing work procedures and efficiency, and it empowers an organization to better rival others (SearchSoftwareQuality, 2018). Quality control can be defined as a procedure by methods for which we watch the real execution and contrast it and some standard. Quality control is the procedure through which we measure the real quality performance, compare it with the guidelines and make remedial move if there is a deviation.
The Main Body.
Total quality management (TQM) is defined as a constant procedure of decreasing or eliminating errors in assembling, streamlining store network administration, enhancing the client encounter, and guaranteeing that employees are prepared with their training (Staff, 2018). TQM expects to hold all parties associated with the generation procedure responsible for the general nature of the last item or services. By implementing TQM, the top management must have strategic planning, customer focus, measurement, analysis and knowledge management, workforce focus, operation focus and results focus. The management must realise that TQM is a long term process and not a short term, it is basically a long term culture change. As a newly appointed quality manager for ETC, it is suggested that the management starts with strategic planning. Senior managers of ETC needs to make action to ensure that the quality of the product they deliver to customers are their number one priority. With the new markets expending rapidly and the demand for products have increased, ETC must ensure that they are willing to take up the responsibility and still produce quality products for their wide range of customers across the country. First of all, ETC have to start planning on how to enlarge their company’s business. They will have to hire more professionals to help in the production of their specialist items which requires quality materials. ETC would also have to contact their suppliers to increase the production and also maintaining the quality of the products. Secondly, it’s workforce focus. ETC have to ensure that all their employees from the lower management to the higher management team have to be constantly well trained. Employees have to be constantly up to date on their work to decrease the mistakes they make. ETC must not train all their employees at once.  By doing so, employees won’t have the attention that they require. The higher management must separate their employees in to groups so that they are able to understand their employees more and to make sure that every employee performs well (Business Insider, 2018). Moreover, ETC must understand that they can’t rush into total quality and putting too many employees into too many teams. This will affect their employees as they will not know what their job scopes are. ETC must have the patience when they implement TQM, it is because it requires major organisational changes in culture and employee’s mind set (Strategosinc.com, 2018). The third step is operation focus. ETC have to change their operation strategy. Employees have to be sure on what their main task is and excel in doing them. Employees have to be very accurate in assembling the products as those products must be high quality and long lasting products. Furthermore, the management have to double check the quality of their products before shipping it out to their customers. The senior managers have to get personally involve in the improvement activities. This is to set a good example for their employees in ETC. The fourth step is customer focus. Meeting customer’s expectation and constantly satisfying customers is part of TQM and most quality management systems. Customer focus is basically what ETC will do to satisfy their customers and to build a long term relationship with them. The management team of ETC have to understand what clients commonly expect in a field, industry, or product offering. ETC also have to ensure that the business has sufficient amount of resources and expertise to reliably convey the expected product or services. Each business owners and managers knows the significance of fulfilled clients, and that it is so costly to discover new clients compared with keeping current clients (CEBOS Quality Management Software, 2018). This is why ETC have to keep a close relationship with the North East hospital management board so that they will continue to renew their contract with ETC after two years. The fifth and final step is results focus. After ETC have implemented the TQM system, they must keep close eyes on the results outcome. The outcome of the results might not be what ETC expects or the outcome might exceed ETC’s expectations. If the results are not what ETC expects, then they have to look in to their plan again and make changes.
Quality Assurance is the infra structure in which a quality control system operates. As the newly appointed quality manager for ETC, it is advised that ETC introduce ISO 9000 into their company. ISO 9000 is a set of rules which is to be followed in order to meet the needs and understand wants of customers. ISO 9000 can be very beneficial to ETC as the goal is to achieve customer satisfaction at its prime. ISO 9000 expects to build up strategies for preventive activities in work procedures and hence to settle on choice in a discerning with a relatively minimal cost (Topalović, 2015). The purpose of the ISO 9000 system is to build up a structure of reference focuses to guarantee that each time a procedure is played out a similar data, strategies, aptitudes and controls are utilized and connected in a reliable way. ISO 9000 is based on the following principles which are customer focus, leadership, involvement of people, process approach, system approach to management, continual improvement, factual approach to decision making, and mutually beneficial supplier relationships. Leadership is the activity of influencing behaviour, beliefs and feelings (Wright & Taylor 1994). The higher management team of ETC should set a clear example to all their employees. For example, clearly state the company’s vision, give clear guidelines on plan to achieve vision, and built confidence and optimism. Leadership styles can be can be classified into a few styles which are autocratic, democratic, and laissez-faire.
Autocratic leadership is defined as a management style wherein one individual controls every one of the choices and takes next to no contributions from other group individuals. Autocratic leaders settle on decisions or choices in light of their own convictions and don’t include others for their recommendation or guidance (The Economic Times, 2018). Autocratic leadership usually takes place when a business is small. As it doesn’t have to consider that many employee’s thoughts. For this case, ETC should never consider autocratic leadership because ETC have a large loyal workforce. By implementing autocratic leadership, it will decrease the motivation level and alienation of the employees. As they will feel like they are not appreciated and valued in the company because their ideas or plans are not taken into consideration by the higher management team.
Democratic leadership is defined as a sort of leadership style in which individuals from the group play a more participative part in the basic leadership process (Verywell Mind, 2018). Everyone in the group is given the same opportunity to express their ideas, thoughts and suggestions. It is advised that everyone should take part in exchanging their ideas and work together as a team. As democratic leadership focuses on team equality and free flow of ideas, leaders are still there to guide and control all their employees so that everyone is on the right track. ETC can consider on democratic leadership as ETC already have a large loyal workforce that work for them since they graduated university. As ETC recognises and rewards their workforce for their loyalty towards the company, employees in ETC will strive their best to take part in every decision making process. By implementing democratic leadership, the workforce of ETC come together as a team to share their ideas and experiences within the business. This might delay the process of decision making, but the outcome will definitely be worth the wait. It is because, as ETC is still a growing company, higher management should put every employee’s idea at the back of their mind before making the final call.
Laissez-Faire leadership is defined as wherein the leader gives full opportunity to his subordinates to follow up on their own. Here, the leader once characterizes the objectives, approaches, programs and the limitation for activity and afterward leaves the rest of the procedure to be executed by the subordinates without anyone else (Business Jargons, 2018). Laissez-Faire is a type of leadership where the higher management team leaves everything to their subordinates to plan and execute the strategy plan. The leadership responsibility is shared by everyone in the company. at sometimes, it can be very useful where it highly motivates and it sparks the creativity in the subordinate’s mind. But in the case of ETC, what they need is a democratic leader. The son and daughter of ETC are keen to change the business model into a 21st century business model. This is why they need a leader to lead the company into a 21st century company and not a leader that passes down everything to their subordinates to execute the plan. Laissez-faire leadership style is basically an absence of leadership that shows itself as non-authority behaviour with an inclination towards getting away from duties and responsibilities (Ryan and Tipu, 2013). Laissez-Faire leadership leaders show little involvement in subordinate’s activities and resulting an impact on hierarchical performance. Lievens et al. (1997) proposes that this non-value-based approach does not set norms nor give input on results to subordinates and prompts subordinates to be demotivated (Lievens Pascal Van Geit Pol Coetsie, 1997). In conclusion, laissez-faire leadership style doesn’t suit ETC as there should be a balance of leadership approaches by the higher management team and a balance of opportunity for the subordinates to show their skills and creativity in turning ETC into a 21st century company.
Quality control is part of quality management which concentrates on achieving the best quality requirements of a product or service. Quality control is based on inspection aspect of quality management while quality assurance is based on how a product is made or how the process is carry out. Quality control is a process of measuring, examining and testing a product or service just so that it meets the industry requirements (Asq.org, 2018). Cost of quality is divided into two separate parts which is cost of conformance and cost of non-conformance. Cost of conformance is a total cost that makes sure the quality of the product is top of the line quality. It is separated into prevention cost and appraisal cost.
Prevention costs alludes to all costs acquired to prevent non-conformance, for example, the ones due for up keeping equipment, tools substitution, investments in worker’s training, and quality change programs (Farooq et al., 2017). Examples of prevention cost can be system development, quality training, supervision of prevention, and quality data gathering, analysis and reporting. System development plays an important role in ETC. As ETC is keen on changing their business model to project itself to customers, suppliers, and investors as a world class 21st century company, the higher management team have to develop a system that suits their current vision and goals for the company. This is where democratic leadership comes in place, leaders have to establish a balance amount of relationship with ETC’s loyal workforce to develop a system that puts ETC business in the 21st century. Other than system development, ETC have to provide quality training for their workforce. For example, paying for their seminars and workshops on self-improvement. By planting the correct and sufficient knowledge in their workforce’s minds, it will spark the creativity in the workforce’s mind and help to improve the company by applying the knowledge that they have learned from the seminars and workshops. Supervision of prevention plays an important part for the leaders of ETC. ETC leaders must keep a close eye on the progress that they have planned. Leaders are advised to supervise every step from scratch to delivering the products to customers. This is to ensure that the product that they produce have a long lasting shelf life. The last example will be quality data gathering, analysis and reporting. ETC will have to review the data collected, analyse, and report to the higher management team to take further actions on how to keep their cost as low as possible and still produce good and long lasting quality products.
Appraisal costs are the costs that identifies a non-conformed unit through review or testing. Failure costs are additionally separated into internal and external failure costs. Internal failure costs incorporate expenses of rework attempts, and scrap when rework is not possible any more. Whereas external costs happen when a non-conforming unit is wrongly conveyed to the purchaser. Cases of external costs are warranty claims and loss of sales and goodwill (Farooq et al., 2017). Examples of a few appraisal cost would be test and inspection of incoming materials, final product testing and inspection, maintenance of test equipment and field testing and appraisal at customer site. ETC management team have to test and inspect incoming materials from their suppliers to make sure that there is no defect in the material. As ETC is an engineering company that supplies specialist items, they cannot afford to have faulty materials coming into the company as it will affect the end product. Final product testing and inspection before shipping it out to customers is very crucial as this will determine whether the product passes the quality control inspection check. Furthermore, ETC have to make sure that they do regular maintenance check on all of their test equipment. This will help fasten the process of the final product and decrease the defects of the products. Lastly, field testing and appraisal at customer site should be practiced by ETC. ETC must make sure that they follow up closely with their customers to ensure that the products delivered are working in good condition.
Conclusion.
In conclusion, as a newly appointed quality manager for ETC, I am keen that if we follow the above steps of applying total quality management, quality assurance and quality control, ETC will definitely grow into a 21st century business. Slowly but surely, by implementing ISO 9000 which mainly focuses on customer satisfaction, ETC will surely see an improvement in terms of receiving worldwide recognition for its product and company image. Furthermore, by incorporating democratic leadership into ETC’s management teams, they will also see an increase of loyal workforce within the company. Lastly, ETC should put more focus on quality control. As ETC wants to expand their business into the 21st century, this means that they will have to improve their products which requires high quality materials and sufficient amount of skills to produce accurate and long lasting items. Cost of quality which includes appraisal cost and prevention cost will help ETC achieve the company’s vision in the near future.