Operations Management, Quality

Résumé du document

Operations management focuses on 'carefully managing the processes to produce and distribute products and services in an attentive way'. We can also say that it is giving customers what they want. 'There have been many significant changes in Operations management during the past few years, involving such aspects as quality, reduction in inventory and cost, improving delivery and lead times'. My study is centred on the first one. Indeed, quality is a real concept sought by many companies nowadays.

We can define this term as ?giving the customer - or the next person in the process - what is required, a product or service fit for use, and doing this in such a way that each task is done right the first time'. The French association of normalization define it more simply as 'the ability of a product or a service to satisfy the needs expressed or potentials of the users'.
Then, we have to differentiate quality from reliability which is ?the probability of a product working effectively over a given period of time', and from luxury: 'cheap mass-produced goods need to be quality even if they do not have luxury features'. Quality also includes the market place quality, the quality of grades and [...]

Extraits

[...] Indeed, all managers talk about quality of service or quality of product nowadays. But do they know what are they talking about? I believe not. They want quality for quality and not quality to improve a whatever process or a way of working. They are obsessed by certifications and image the customers have of their brand or company. But what about customers' satisfaction? What do want consumers? To my mind, customers want to control outpts of companies, and even the way they produce them. [...]

[...] Finally, we will discuss about quality orientations and what that results. The need for master quality appeared just after the Second World War because of the demand of domestic buyers. At this moment , companies did not take quality into account. Indeed, their objectives and interests were more about how to raise outputs and economies of scale and reduce the production costs, increase sales, make profit (etc). They had to adapt their policy and aims to customers' needs and wants. [...]

[...] So you check between each operation if products have a certain level of quality to be able to undergo the following operation. It is a way of implementing quality into the transformational process itself in order to prevent defects by applying procedures that describe step by step the actions that employees have to do, or by using the Quality Problem Solving Methodology (QPSM) to understand causes of non quality. The latter can be first the deviation of output from design specification, in other words it concerns operations do wrongly or simply not do. [...]

[...] So every parts of the process are concerned by what we can qualify as the quality improvement effort. So everyone/everything in the transformational process is necessary in this quality improvement thanks to the add of everybody's experience. above forms the basis from which the philosophy of Quality Assurance has evolved, and the achievement of quality or the “fitness-for-purpose” is “Quality Awareness” throughout the company.'[5] But how a company can differenciate from another which has not implemented quality's policies in itself and how it can be recognise as a ‘good quality firm'? [...]

[...] Moreover, the certifications are very difficult to have. So companies work very hard to obtain the ISO standards one. When they get them, perhaps they rest on their ‘acquisitions' and do not make efforts any more to continue improving their quality level, in particular into the transformational process. Nowadays those behaviors are almost, and unfortunately, comun. So the reference marks which the customers have on the quality standards in a company can be skewed. Following what was seen as previously, we can say that it exist a real problem of communication between the company and the customers because each one require quality, but none of them for the same reasons or the same objectives. [...]