WHAT MEAN BY QUALITY?

"Quality itself has been defined as fundamentally relational: 'Quality is the ongoing process of building and sustaining relationships by assessing, anticipating, and fulfilling stated and implied needs.' "Even those quality definitions which are not expressly relational have an implicit relational character. Why do we try to do the right thing right, on time, every time? To build and sustain relationships. Why do we seek zero defects and conformance to requirements (or their modern counterpart, six sigma)? To build and sustain relationships. Why do we seek to structure features or characteristics of a product or service that bear on their ability to satisfy stated and implied needs? (ANSI/ASQC.) To build and sustain relationships. The focus of continuous improvement is, likewise, the building and sustaining of relationships. It would be difficult to find a realistic definition of quality that did not have, implicit within the definition, a fundamental express or implied focus of building and sustaining relationships."

problems
Small scale industries are at a distinct disadvantage as compared to large scale industries. The scale of operations, availability of finance, ability to use modern technology, procurement of raw materials are some of these areas. This gives rise to several problems. Most of these problems can be attributed to the small size of their business, which prevents them from taking advantages, which accrue to large business organisations. However, the problems faced are not similar to all the categories of small businesses. For instance, in the case of small ancillary units, the major problems include delayed payments, uncertainty of getting orders from the parent units and frequent changes in production processes. The problems of traditional small scale units include remote location with less developed infrastructural facilities, lack of managerial talent, poor quality, traditional technology and inadequate availability of finance. The problems of exporting small scale units include lack of adequate data on foreign markets, lack of market intelligence, exchange rate fluctuations, quality standards, and pre-

shipment finance. In general the small businesses are faced with the following problems:

Finance: One of the severe problems faced by SSIs is that of nonavailability of adequate finance to carry out its operations. Generally a small business begins with a small capital base. Many of the units in the small sector lack the credit worthiness required to raise as capital from the capital markets. As a result, they heavily depend on local financial resources and are frequently the victims of exploitation by the money lenders. These units frequently suffer from lack of adequate working capital, either due to delayed payment of dues to them or locking up of their capital in unsold stocks. Banks also do not lend money without adequate collateral security or guarantees and margin money, which many of them are not in a position to provide. Raw materials: Another major problem of small business is the procuremen t of raw materials. If the required materials are not available, they have to compromise on the quality or have to pay a high price to get good quality materials. Their bargaining power is relatively low due to the small quantity of purchases made by them. Also, they cannot afford to take the risk of buying in bulk as they have no facilities to store the materials. Because of general scarcity of metals, chemicals and extractive raw materials in the economy, the small scale sector suffers the most. This also means a waste of production capacity for the economy and loss of further units. Managerial skills: Small business is generally promoted and operated by a single person, who may not possess all the managerial skills required to run the business. Many of the small business entrepreneurs possess sound technical knowledge but are less successful in marketing the output. Moreover, they may not find enough time to take care of all functional activities. At the same time they are not in a position to afford professional managers. Labour: Small business firms cannot afford to pay higher salaries to the employees, which affects employee willingness to work hard and produce more. Thus, productivity per employee is relatively low and employee turn over is generally high. Because of lower remuneration offered, attracting talented people is a major problem in small business organisations. Unskilled workers join for low remuneration but training them is a time consuming process. Also, unlike large organisations, division of labour cannot be practised, which results in lack of specialisation and concentration. Marketing: Marketing is one of the most important activities as it generates revenue. Effective marketing of goods requires a thorough understanding of the customers needs and requirements. In most cases, marketing is a weaker area of small organisations. These organisations have, therefore, to depend excessively on middlemen, who at times exploit them by paying low price and delayed payments. Further, direct marketing may not be feasible for small business firms as they lack the necessary infrastructure. Quality: Many small business organisations do not adhere to desired standards of quality. Instead they concentrate on cutting the cost and keeping the prices low. They do not have adequate resources to invest in quality research and maintain the standards of the industry, nor do they have the expertise to upgrade technology. In fact maintaining quality is their weakest point, when competing in global markets.

Capacity utilisation: Due to lack of marketing skills or lack of demand, many small business firms have to operate below full capacity due to which their operating costs tend to increase. Gradually this leads to sickness and closure of the business. Technology: Use of outdated technology is often stated as serious lacunae in the case of small industries, resulting in low productivity and uneconomical production. Sickness: Prevalence of sickness in small industries has become a point of worry to both the policy makers and the entrepreneurs. The causes of sickness are both internal and external. Internal problems include lack of skilled and trained labour and managerial and marketing skills. Some of the external problems include delayed payment, shortage of working capital, inadequate loans and lack of demand for their products. Global competition: Apart from the problems stated above small businesses are not without fears, especially in the present context of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation (LPG) policies being followed by several countries across the world. Let us look into the areas where small businesses feel threatened with the onslaught of global competition. o Competition is not only from medium and large industries, but also from multinational companies which are giants in terms of their size and business volumes. Opening up of trade results in cut throat competition for small scale units. o It is difficult to withstand the quality standards, technological skills, financial creditworthiness, managerial and marketing capabilities of the large industries and multinationals. o There is limited access to markets of developed countries due to the stringent requirements of quality certification like ISO 9000.

Quality management evolution

Quality management is a recent phenomenon. Advanced civilizations that supported the arts and crafts allowed clients to choose goods meeting higher quality standards than normal goods. In societies where art responsibilities of a master craftsman (and similarly for artists) was to lead their studio, train and supervise the on, the importance of craftsmen was diminished as mass production and repetitive work practices were instituted. The aim was to produce large numbers of the same goods. The first proponent in the US for this approach was Eli Whitney who proposed (interchangeable) parts manufacture for muskets, hence producing the identical components and creating a musket assembly line. The next step forward was promoted by several people including Frederick Winslow Taylor a mechanical engineer who sought to improve industrial efficiency. He is sometimes called "the father of scientific management." He was one of the intellectual leaders of the Efficiency Movement and part of his approach laid a further foundation for quality management, including aspects like standardization and adopting improved practices. Henry Ford also was important in bringing process and quality management practices into operation in his assembly lines. In Germany, Karl Friedrich Benz, often called the inventor of the motor car, was pursuing similar assembly and production practices, although real mass production was properly initiated in Volkswagen after World War II. From this period onwards, North American companies focused predominantly upon production against lower cost with increased efficiency. Walter A. Shewhart made a major step in the evolution towards quality management by creating a method for quality control for production, using statistical methods, first proposed in 1924. This became the foundation for his ongoing work on statistical quality control. W. Edwards Deming later applied statistical process control methods in the United States during World War II, thereby successfully improving quality in the manufacture of munitions and other strategically important products. Quality leadership from a national perspective has changed over the past five to six decades. After the second world war, Japan decided to make quality improvement a national imperative as part of rebuilding their economy, and sought the help of Shewhart, Deming and Juran, amongst others. W. Edwards Deming championed Shewhart's ideas in Japan from 1950 onwards. He is probably best known for his management philosophy establishing quality, productivity, and competitive position. He has formulated 14 points of attention for managers, which are a high level abstraction of many of his deep insights. They should be interpreted by learning and understanding the deeper insights and include:

Break down barriers between departments Management should learn their responsibilities, and take on leadership Improve constantly Institute a programme of education and self-improvement

In the 1950s and 1960s, Japanese goods were synonymous with cheapness and low quality, but over time their quality initiatives began to be successful, with Japan achieving very high levels of quality in products from the 1970s onward. For example, Japanese cars regularly top the J.D. Power customer satisfaction ratings. In the 1980s Deming was asked by Ford Motor Company to start a quality initiative after they realized that they were falling behind Japanese manufacturers. A number of highly successful quality initiatives have been invented by the Japanese (see for example on this page: Taguchi, QFD, Toyota Production System. Many of

the methods not only provide techniques but also have associated quality culture (i.e. people factors). These methods are now adopted by the same western countries that decades earlier derided Japanese methods. Customers recognize that quality is an important attribute in products and services. Suppliers recognize that quality can be an important differentiator between their own offerings and those of competitors (quality differentiation is also called the quality gap). In the past two decades this quality gap has been greatly reduced between competitive products and services. This is partly due to the contracting (also called outsourcing) of manufacture to countries like India and China, as well internationalization of trade and competition. These countries amongst many others have raised their own standards of quality in order to meet International standards and customer demands. The ISO 9000 series of standards are probably the best known International standards for quality management. There are a huge number of books available on quality management. In recent times some themes have become more significant including quality culture, the importance of knowledge management, and the role of leadership in promoting and achieving high quality. Disciplines like systems thinking are bringing more holistic approaches to quality so that people, process and products are considered together rather than independent factors in quality management. The influence of quality thinking has spread to non-traditional applications outside of walls of manufacturing, extending into service sectors and into areas such as sales, marketing and customer service

Principles
Quality management adopts a number of management principles[3] that can be used by top management to guide their organizations towards improved performance. The principles include:
[edit] Customer focus

Since the organizations depend on their customers, therefore they should understand current and future customer needs, should meet customer requirements and try to exceed the expectations of customers.[4] An organization attains customer focus when all people in the organization know both the internal and external customers and also what customer requirements must be met to ensure that both the internal and external customers are satisfied.[5]
[edit] Leadership

Leaders of an organization establish unity of purpose and direction of it. They should go for creation and maintenance of such an internal environment, in which people can become fully involved in achieving the organization's quality objective.[4]

[edit] Involvement of people

People at all levels of an organization are the essence of it. Their complete involvement enables their abilities to be used for the benefit of the organization.[4]
[edit] Process approach

The desired result can be achieved when activities and related resources are managed in an organization as process.[4]
[edit] System approach to management

An organization's effectiveness and efficiency in achieving its quality objectives are contributed by identifying, understanding and managing all interrelated processes as a system.[4]
[edit] Continual improvement

One of the permanent quality objectives of an organization should be the continual improvement of its overall performance.[4]
[edit] Factual approach to decision making

Effective decisions are always based on the data analysis and information.[4]
[edit] Mutually beneficial supplier relationships

Since an organization and its suppliers are interdependent, therefore a mutually beneficial relationship between them increases the ability of both to add value.[4] These eight principles form the basis for the quality management system standard ISO 9001:2008.[4]

[edit] Quality improvement

There are many methods for quality improvement. These cover product improvement, process improvement and people based improvement. In the following list are methods of quality management and techniques that incorporate and drive quality improvement:
1. ISO 9004:2008 guidelines for performance improvement. 2. ISO 15504-4: 2005 information technology process assessment Part 4: Guidance on use for process improvement and process capability determination. 3. QFD quality function deployment, also known as the house of quality approach. 4. Kaizen , Japanese for change for the better; the common English term is continuous improvement. 5. Zero Defect Program created by NEC Corporation of Japan, based upon statistical process control and one of the inputs for the inventors of Six Sigma. 6. Six Sigma 6, Six Sigma combines established methods such as statistical process control, design of experiments and failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) in an overall framework.

7. PDCA plan, do, check, act cycle for quality control purposes. (Six Sigma's DMAIC method (define, measure, analyze, improve, control) may be viewed as a particular implementation of this.) 8. Quality circle a group (people oriented) approach to improvement. 9. Taguchi methods statistical oriented methods including quality robustness, quality loss function, and target specifications. 10. The Toyota Production System reworked in the west into lean manufacturing. 11. Kansei Engineering an approach that focuses on capturing customer emotional feedback about products to drive improvement. 12. TQM total quality management is a management strategy aimed at embedding awareness of quality in all organizational processes. First promoted in Japan with the Deming prize which was adopted and adapted in USA as the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and in Europe as the European Foundation for Quality Management award (each with their own variations). 13. TRIZ meaning "theory of inventive problem solving" 14. BPR business process reengineering, a management approach aiming at 'clean slate' improvements (That is, ignoring existing practices). 15. OQM Object-oriented Quality Management, a model for quality management.[6]

Proponents of each approach have sought to improve them as well as apply them for small, medium and large gains. Simple one is Process Approach, which forms the basis of ISO 9001:2008 Quality Management System standard, duly driven from the 'Eight principles of Quality managagement', process approach being one of them. Thareja[7] writes about the mechanism and benefits: "The process (proficiency) may be limited in words, but not in its applicability. While it fulfills the criteria of all-round gains: in terms of the competencies augmented by the participants; the organisation seeks newer directions to the business success, the individual brand image of both the people and the organisation, in turn, goes up. The competencies which were hitherto rated as being smaller, are better recognized and now acclaimed to be more potent and fruitful".[8] The more complex Quality improvement tools are tailored for enterprise types not originally targeted. For example, Six Sigma was designed for manufacturing but has spread to service enterprises. Each of these approaches and methods has met with success but also with failures. Some of the common differentiators between success and failure include commitment, knowledge and expertise to guide improvement, scope of change/improvement desired (Big Bang type changes tend to fail more often compared to smaller changes) and adaption to enterprise cultures. For example, quality circles do not work well in every enterprise (and are even discouraged by some managers), and relatively few TQM-participating enterprises have won the national quality awards. There have been well publicized failures of BPR, as well as Six Sigma. Enterprises therefore need to consider carefully which quality improvement methods to adopt, and certainly should not adopt all those listed here. It is important not to underestimate the people factors, such as culture, in selecting a quality improvement approach. Any improvement (change) takes time to implement, gain acceptance and stabilize as accepted practice. Improvement must allow pauses between implementing new changes so that the change is stabilized and assessed as a real improvement, before the next improvement is made (hence continual improvement, not continuous improvement).

Improvements that change the culture take longer as they have to overcome greater resistance to change. It is easier and often more effective to work within the existing cultural boundaries and make small improvements (that is Kaizen) than to make major transformational changes. Use of Kaizen in Japan was a major reason for the creation of Japanese industrial and economic strength. On the other hand, transformational change works best when an enterprise faces a crisis and needs to make major changes in order to survive. In Japan, the land of Kaizen, Carlos Ghosn led a transformational change at Nissan Motor Company which was in a financial and operational crisis. Well organized quality improvement programs take all these factors into account when selecting the quality improvement methods.

[edit] Quality standards

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) created the Quality Management System (QMS) standards in 1987. They were the ISO 9000:1987 series of standards comprising ISO 9001:1987, ISO 9002:1987 and ISO 9003:1987; which were applicable in different types of industries, based on the type of activity or process: designing, production or service delivery. The standards are reviewed every few years by the International Organization for Standardization. The version in 1994 was called the ISO 9000:1994 series; consisting of the ISO 9001:1994, 9002:1994 and 9003:1994 versions. The last major revision was in the year 2008 and the series was called ISO 9000:2000 series. The ISO 9002 and 9003 standards were integrated into one single certifiable standard: ISO 9001:2008. After December 2003, organizations holding ISO 9002 or 9003 standards had to complete a transition to the new standard. ISO released a minor revision, ISO 9001:2008 on 14 October 2008. It contains no new requirements. Many of the changes were to improve consistency in grammar, facilitating translation of the standard into other languages for use by over 950,000 certified organisations in the 175 countries (as at Dec 2007) that use the standard. The ISO 9004:2009 document gives guidelines for performance improvement over and above the basic standard (ISO 9001:2000). This standard provides a measurement framework for improved quality management, similar to and based upon the measurement framework for process assessment. The Quality Management System standards created by ISO are meant to certify the processes and the system of an organization, not the product or service itself. ISO 9000 standards do not certify the quality of the product or service. In 2005 the International Organization for Standardization released a standard, ISO 22000, meant for the food industry. This standard covers the values and principles of ISO 9000 and the HACCP standards. It gives one single integrated standard for the food industry and is expected to become more popular in the coming years in such industry.

ISO has also released standards for other industries. For example Technical Standard TS 16949 defines requirements in addition to those in ISO 9001:2008 specifically for the automotive industry. ISO has a number of standards that support quality management. One group describes processes (including ISO 12207 & ISO 15288) and another describes process assessment and improvement ISO 15504. The Software Engineering Institute has its own process assessment and improvement methods, called CMMi (Capability Maturity Model integrated) and IDEAL respectively.

[edit] Quality software

The software used to track the three main components of quality management through the use of databases and/or charting applications.

[edit] Quality terms

Quality Improvement can be distinguished from Quality Control in that Quality Improvement is the purposeful change of a process to improve the reliability of achieving an outcome. Quality Control is the ongoing effort to maintain the integrity of a process to maintain the reliability of achieving an outcome. Quality Assurance is the planned or systematic actions necessary to provide enough confidence that a product or service will satisfy the given requirements.

[edit] Academic resources

Group members

Viarj wadkar

123

Akanksha wadnerkar

123

Ritesh tiwari

147

Sayali tiwari

7878

Rohit sing

785

Amit soni

785

Radhika bhat

751

Naresh sutar

458

Viarj wadkar Akanksha wadnerkar Ritesh tiwari Sayali tiwari Rohit sing Amit soni Radhika bhat Naresh sutar

123 123 147 7878 785 785 751 458

Viarj wadkar Akanksha wadnerkar Ritesh tiwari Sayali tiwari Rohit sing Amit soni Radhika bhat Naresh sutar

123 123 147 7878 785 785 751 458

montywadkar@gmail.com

viraj.wadkar@hotmail.com