UNIT-2 TQM PRINCIPLES

Customer satisfaction – Customer Perception of Quality, Customer Complaints, Service Quality,

Customer Retention, Employee Involvement – Motivation, Empowerment, Teams, Recognition and Reward, Performance Appraisal, Benefits, Continuous Process Improvement – Juran Trilogy, PDSA Cycle, 5S, Kaizen, Supplier Partnership – Partnering, sourcing, Supplier Selection, Supplier Rating, Relationship Development, Performance Measures – Basic Concepts, Strategy, Performance Measure-Business Excellence Model-Rajiv Gandhi National Quality Award

MARKS QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

1.  Define customer satisfaction and draw the model.

Customer satisfaction is a combination of (a) Technology (Hardware and software,) Product, Price Quality and Responses, delivery and appropriate communication. (b) Perceived knowledge of the company cost of product and personal expectations, Needs and Attributes.

Teboul’s Customer satisfaction model.

Customer’s needs are represented by the circle and square depicts the product or service offered by the organization. Total satisfaction is achieved when the offer matches the need or the circle is superimposed on the square. The goal is to cover the expected performance level better than the competitors.

The part of the square that lies with in the circle is perceived by the customer as satisfying and the part of the square outside the circle is perceived as unnecessary.

2. Define and explain the customers in detail (or) Define customers and explain their types.

Customer is defined as the one who uses the product or service, the one who purchases the product or service or the one who influences the sale of the product or service.

Types are

(i) External customers

(ii) Internal customers.

An external customer exists outside the organization and be falls in three categories

ü  Current

ü  Prospective

ü  Lost customers.

An internal customer – whether it may be engineering order processing or production each receives a product or service and in exchange provides a product or service. Every person in a process is considered as customer of preceding operation.

3. Explain Customer/ Supplier chain

All processes have outputs which are used by internal or external customers and inputs which are provided by internal or external suppliers. Each supplier performs work that produces some service or product that is used by another customer.

Customer /supplier chain

Every chain ends with external customer and starts with external supplier.

4. List the steps to evaluate customer satisfaction.

¨  Study the buying procedures of each customer organization and map them with respect to individuals.

¨  Determine the factors of buyer-seller interactions

¨  Analyze the trends of above and formulate the indices, to represent of all relevant features such as repeat orders, switching suppliers, and number of customers lost as well as gained.

5. List the factors that are determining the customer satisfaction.

Ø  Quality of supply

Ø  Product installation/commissioning

Ø  Product performance, ease of operation and control

Ø  After sales service

Ø  Reliability

Ø  Maintainability

Ø  Serviceability.

6. Define-Employee involvement (April/May’05) (4m)

Employee involvement is an approach to improve quality and productivity. It is a mean to better meet the organization’s goals for quality and productivity at all the levels of an organization. Employee involvement is possible by

ü  Educating the employees

ü  Providing training to the employees

ü  Empowerment

ü  Participating in groups.

7. Define employee empowerment and list the conditions needed to Create empowered environment.

Empowerment is an environment in which people will have the ability, the confidence and the commitment to take the responsibility and ownership to improve process and initiate the necessary well-defined boundaries in order to achieve organizational values and goals.

To create empowered environment the conditions needed are:-

ü  Everyone must understand the need for change.

ü  The system needs to change to the new paradigm

ü  The organization must enable its employees.

8. Define team and teamwork

A team is defined as a group of people working together to achieve common objectives or goals. Team work is the cumulative actions of the team during which each member of the team subordinates his individual interests and opinions to fulfill the objectives or goals of the group.

9. Explain the various types of team

®  Process improvement team

The members of the team represent each operation of the process or sub-process. Slope of the team’s activity is limited to the work unit. A team of about six to ten members will come from the work unit.

®  Cross functional team

A team of about six to ten members will represent a number of different functional areas such as engineering, marketing, accounting, production, quality and human resources. It may also include the customer and supplier.

®  Natural work teams

This type of team is not voluntary. It is composed of all the members of work unit. It differs than quality control circles because a manager is part of the team and the projects to be improved and are selected by the management.

®  Self directed/self-managed work teams

They are an extension of natural work teams with out the supervisor. There is wide discretion to organize their work subject to organizational work flow requirements. There is a team coordinator to liaison with senior management that may rotate among members

10. Explain the various decision making methods.

®  Non decision

A team will discuss a subject but not arrive at a decision.

®  Unilateral decision

This type of decision is made by one person, usually leader of the team

®  Hand clasp decision.

This decision occurs when one person proposes a decision and another one agrees the same.

®  Minority –rule decision.

When a few team members dominate the discussion and impose their will on the majority, this type of decision occurs.

®  Majority –rule decision

This method is widely used when most of the team agrees on the best alternative.

®  Consensus

This method requires sufficient discussion for all members to feel they can support the decision.

11. List the essentials needed for effective team meetings.

Ø  Meetings should be regularly scheduled

Ø  Participants should be notified ahead of time with location, time and objective

Ø  Avoid unnecessary meetings through e-mail, voice mail and telephone calls.

Ø  An agenda should be developed

Ø  T should be sent to the participants prior to the meetings.

Ø  Agendas usually list opening hours, previous meeting feedback, agenda review, agenda items, summary and action teams.

Ø  Periodical evaluation of meetings, should be done.

12. Explain the steps of training.

Ø  First step in the training process is to make everyone aware of what the training is all about.

Ø  To get acceptance

Ø  To adopt the program

Ø  To adopt to what has been agreed upon

13. Write short notes on Recognition.

Recognition is a form of employee motivation in which the organization publicly acknowledges the positive contributions an individual or team has made to the success of the organization. This acknowledgement is delivered using verbal and written praise and may include symbolic items such as certificates and plaques.

A person’s feeling of achievement, value to the organization, knowing the organization’s care is more important and some firms of recognition are pictures on the bulleting board, articles in news letters or newspapers, letters to families, making compliments from others, personal phone calls or notes, placing positive notes in folders and increased responsibility.

14. Write short notes on Reward system

Reward is something tangible such as theater tickets, dinner for two or a cash award to promote desirable behavior.

Individual rewards include better parking space, gift certificates gift to charity in the name of recipient, dinner out, washing an employees car during the lunch hour, trips and event tickets to name a few.

Group rewards are similar and can also include an outing such as a ball game, bowling and movies; group lunch or dinner

15. Explain intrinsic and extrinsic reward systems.

Intrinsic rewards:

Ø  Non-monetary forms of recognition to acknowledge achievement of quality improvement goals.

Ø  Celebrations to acknowledge achievement of quality improvement goals.

Ø  Regular expressions of appreciation by managers and leaders to employees to acknowledge achievement of quality improvement goals.

Ø  360o performance appraisals – feedback from coworkers (other than the immediate supervisor), subordinator or customers is incorporated into performance appraisals.

Ø  Formal suggestion system available for individuals to make quality improvement suggestions.

Ø  Developmental based performance appraisals

Ø  Quality based promotions

Extrinsic rewards:

Þ  Profit sharing

Þ  Gain sharing

Þ  Employment security

Þ  Compensation time

Þ  Individual based performance systems

Þ  Quality based performance appraisals.

16. List the essentials of an effective recognition and reward system.

à  Serves as a continual remainder that the organization regards quality and productivity as important.

à  Offers the organization a visible technique to thank high achievers for outstanding performance

à  Provides employees a specific goal to work toward. It motivates them to improve the process.

à  Boosts morale in the work environment by creating healthy sense of competition among individuals and teams seeking recognition.

17. Define Gain sharing and Profit sharing.

Profit sharing is defined as a one in which the stake holders share a portion of the year end profits with salaried and occasionally hourly employees.

Gain sharing is a financial reward and recognition system that results form improved organizational performance. This is based on the philosophy that people and the teamwork are the keys to success. Because organizational success depends on team effort, the team shares in the rewards of the success.

18. Write short notes on performance appraisal.

Purpose of performance appraisal is to let employees know how they are doing and provides a basis for promotions, salary increases, counseling and other purposes related to an employee’s future. Performance appraisals may be for teem or individuals.

Some improvement suggestions are:-

¨  Using rating scales that have few rating categories.

¨  Require work team or group evolutions that are at least equal in emphasis to individual –focused evaluations.

¨  Require more frequent performance reviews where such reviews will have a dominant emphasis on future performance planning.

¨  Promotion decisions should be made by an independent administrative process that draws on current –job information and potential for the new job.

¨  Include indexes of external customer satisfaction in the appraisal process

¨  Use peer and subordinate feedback as an index of internal customer satisfaction.

¨  Include evaluation for process improvement in addition to results.

19. List out the benefits of employee involvement (April/May ‘05) (4marks)

ü  Employees make better decisions using their expert knowledge of the process

ü  Employees are more likely to implement and support decisions they had a part in making

ü  Employees are better able to spot and pinpoint the areas for improvement.

ü  Employees are better able to take immediate connective action.

ü  Employee involvement reduces labor/ management friction by encouraging move effective communication and cooperation

ü  Employee involvement increases morale by creating a feeling of belonging to the origination.

ü  Employees are better able to accept change because they control the work environment.

ü  Employees have an increased commitment to unit goals because they are involved.

20. List the ways by which improvement can be made.

Ø  Viewing all work as a process. Whether it is associated with production or business activities.

Ø  Making all processes effective, efficient and adaptable.

Ø  Anticipating changing customer needs.

Ø  Controlling in-process performance using measures such as scrap reduction, cycle time, control charts and so fort.

Ø  Maintaining constructive dissatisfaction with the present level of performance.

Ø  Eliminating waste and rework wherever it occurs

Ø  Investigating activities that don’t add value to the product or service with the aim of eliminating those activities.

Ø  Eliminating non conformities in all phases of everyone’s work, even if the increment of improvement is small.

Ø  Using benchmarking to improve competitive advantage.

Ø  Innovating to achieve break thorough.

Ø  In corpora ting lessons teamed into future activities

Ø  Using technical tools such as statistical process control (SPC), Experimental design, Bench marking, Quality function deployment (QFD) etc.

21. Write short notes on four improvement strategies.

Repair

This is simple. Anything broken must be fixed so that it functions as designed.

This has two levels one is temporary or short term measure ex: It a customer receives

a damaged product, quick fix is needed. The second level occurs when an individual

or team identifies and eliminates the rod causes of the problem and affects a

permanent solution

Refinement

This involves activities that continually improve a process that is not broken. It relies on doing things just a bit quicker, better, easier or with less waste.

Organizational programs-such as process improvement teams-suggestion systems and empowerment are combinations of repair and refinement.

Renovation

This results in major or break through improvements. Innovation and technological advancements are key factors in this approach.

Renovation is more costly

Reinvention (or) Reengineering

This is the most demanding improvement strategy. It is preceded by the heeling that the current approach will never satisfy customer requirements, Reinvention or reengineering begins by imagining that the previous condition doesn’t exist.

22. Explain the various types of problems.

Compliance

This is the performance problem where an existing system is not performing satisfactorily. This occurs when a structured system having standardized inputs, processes and outputs is performing unacceptably from users view point. Major challenge is to identify root cause of non conformity and then take connective action.

Unstructured

This is also a performance problem. The absence of standards may be due to system immaturity or to the need for flexibility in system performance.

Efficiency

This is a performance problem. Here the efficiency problems occur when the system is performing unacceptably form the few point of its owners or operators. The end user is not satisfied. How ever the process is move costly than desired.