Implementing Total Quality Management: A Case Study On Banks Sadler Company
Background
Total Quality Management includes all the efforts of the organization for installing and making permanent an environment in which a company regularly enhances its capabilities to supply services and products of high quality to the customers (Sallis, 2014). This report is being prepared in order to explain the concept of Total Quality Management. With the help of Quality Circles and Benchmarking tools, it will be identified that how an event organization can implement it in order to improve its performance in the market and the limitations of these tools. In order to proceed with this Banks Sadler Company has been selected.
Bank Sadler is an agency of event management and global meetings. In last 10 Years, they have provided regional support to their clients and opened the offices in various places such as York (2005), Dusseldorf (2007), Paris (2007), and New York (2011) (Banks Sadler, 2017). The industry of events and meeting has gone through various changes and Banks Sadler has always been at the front position of that development. Today, they are counted in the leading event management names and sector of venue sourcing.
The aspiration of the company is to operate collaboratively with their customers is the basis of their business. They have a philosophy of self-evaluation and regular enhancement to confirm present and future customers take the best service of event management every time (Banks Sadler, 2015).
In the early 1980s, the industrialized countries of Western Europe and North America faced economic crises due to strong competition from the ability of Japan to make goods of high quality at a competitive price (Quality Assurance, 2018). For the first time when the Industrial Revolution started, the U.K became an importer of finished goods. The U.S started its own thought, stated most deliberately in the TV program that If Japan Can do it then why can’t we? Companies started reassessing the quality control techniques designed for 50 years and how those methods or techniques had been effectively used by the Japanese (Quality Management system, 2018). It was in the middle of the economic chaos that Total Quality Management took origin. The particular derivation of the “total quality management” term is undefined. It is nearly stimulated by Kaoru Ishikawa’s Total Quality Control the Japanese Way and Armand V. Feigenbaum’s book Total Quality Control. It may be first invented in the U.K in 1983 by the Trade and Industry department “National quality Campaign”. Even it might be invented in the U.S by Naval Air Systems Command in order to explain its efforts in 1985 of quality improvement (Kiran, 2016).
Total Quality Management
Dr. Walter Shewhart
In the list of top quality gurus’ the first on is Walter Shewhart. He is the one who invented the PDCA (plan, do, check, and act) along with process control theories and transformation process of Shewhart (Bizmanualz, 2017).
Dr. W. Edwards Derming
The complete management philosophy was developed by Dr. Deming, which he summarized in his the “seven deadly diseases of management” and “fourteen points”. He developed the state of quality, formerly grounded on the effort done by Shewhart with his elucidations of variation, control charts, and theories of knowledge, psychology, and variation (Neyestan, 2017).
Dr. Joseph M. Juran
The quality trilogy i.e. quality planning, improvement, and control was developed by Dr. Juran.
A quality circle is a technique of participative management that is involved in supporting employees in solving their problems linked to their work or job. Circles are created of the employees who are functioning together in a process who interact with each other after some time intervals in order to discuss the quality problems and to identify the solutions (Kumar and Kumar, 2014).
Features of Quality Circle
It is a small employees group
Approx. 8 to 10 employees are involved in the small group of quality circle. If there will be less than 5 employees in the circle then the circle can lose its strength because of absenteeism. This makes circle inactive. However, circles with more than 15 members can result in rejection of opportunities for everyone.
A quality circle is arranged in a similar type of work or in the same work area.
A quality circle is said to be an identical group and not inter disciplinary or inter-departmental one. The employees involved in the activities of the circle should be on similar wave-length (Banerjee, 2012).
Quality Circles are voluntary
The employees can willingly join the quality circle. It is not compulsory for every employee to be the part of these circles.
Quality Circles are about meeting regularly
Generally, employees involved in quality circle meet weekly with each other for about an hour. Therefore, it is possible for the employees of quality circle interact at least four times a month.
Quality Circles recognizes, examines and resolves problems related to work
Employees who work regularly in the workplace are the one who knows about the barriers between the achievements of high quality, optimum performance and productivity and also how they can be improved. Therefore, the employees involved in the circles can identify the issues and provide suggestions to the management to solve those issues.
Quality Circles: A Tool for Improving Performance
Bank Sadler is a well-known company in the Event organization industry which offers excellent services to its client so that customers can get a lifetime experience. But there is no organization who do not face any challenges while running the business so as Bank Sadler.
For example, In Banks Sadler, sometimes the time intervals which are set by the employees are of longer time duration which becomes a problem for their department. For an event at the initial stage, the group of employees divides the roles among each other and set the time duration of the meetings so that at the end they can organize the work successfully. But due to delay in the task performed by any of the employee waste the time of other employees or even it can result in skipping the date of the event. Moreover, due to these delays, the employees are not able to interact in the meetings as they have to shift their meeting intervals which might be able to impact the work of other people.
In order to solve this problem Quality circle tool should be adopted by Banks Sadler. According to this tool the circles of the 8 to 10 willing employees will be made who are working on the similar task or job. The meeting time intervals will be set on a weekly basis in which all the circle members will meet weekly and will discuss the progress and issues faced. This will help the company in avoiding the lapse of event date and losses due to long interval meetings. Besides this, it will increase the interaction between employees which will help in increasing the productivity of the company.
- As per the concept of the quality circle the membership in the circle is voluntary, any of the employee or member has right to drop out whenever they want. This option can result in forcing any other member to join the circle in the company.
- The discussion on the selected problem can result in increasing the conflicts among the members of the circle. Even one dominating member can impact the decision which can provide adverse results for the company.
- It can take up an issue which is hard to resolve, consequently, wasting their energy and time.
- Fixing the time of the meeting becomes problematic due to inconsistent working demand.
- If the management of the company did not implement the suggestions provided by the circle members then it can reflect a negative image of the company and can demotivate the members of the circle and eventually they will not work wholeheartedly (Account Learning, 2018).
The procedure of evaluating the company’s service and product performance against the competitor who is considered as the best player in the industry is known as Benchmarking (Schechter, 2012). The concept of benchmarking is to recognize the internal opportunities enhancements. It can be done by examining those companies whose performance is excellent, then identifying the reason behind their good performance and eventually implementing those changes can be implemented (Shopify, 2018).
- First, a service, product or internal department is selected to benchmark.
- Define the company with excellent performance should be benchmarked against
- Information is collected about the internal performance or metrics
- Data of both the organization is compared in order to identify the gaps in the company’s performance (Singh, Grover, and Singh, 2013).
- Policies and processes of the benchmarked company are adopted
Identify the area to be benchmarked
In the initial step, the team of Banks Sadler Company needs to identify one area, process, service or product that they want to benchmark. They need to think about the changes that are required to reach the benchmark. Besides this company have to focus on the methods that will be used to achieve benchmark.
Limitations of Quality Circles
Identify the Company that to be benchmarked
In this step Bank Sadler need to choose the company which is performing excellently in the market. Here, not just only performance will be considered in fact the revenue of the company will also be considered while choosing the company for benchmarking. In the sector of event management, Jack Morton Worldwide is the benchmarking company.
Collect Information
The required data should be collected in order to improve the organization performance. For the improvement in the performance here is need to make various changes internally and externally. The important and relevant information will help in performing the comparison between the Banks Sadler and Benchmarked company i.e. Jack Morton Worldwide.
Analysing the Gap
At this step, the gaps between the performance of Banks Sadler and Jack Morton Worldwide i.e. benchmarked company will be identified with the help of information collected at the above step. To achieve the benchmark company have to evaluate the gaps such that strategies and policies can be implemented to fill those gaps.
Jack Morton Worldwide is the leader in moving image, immersive and inventive technology, public events, broadcast design, and exhibits (Jack Morton, 2018). It shows the company ensures quality to their clients due to which they are at number 1 position. It sets the benchmark for all the companies dealing in this sector including Banks Sadler.
As per the evaluation and identification of the gap between the performance of Banks Sadler and John Morton Worldwide, they will recognize the changes that are required to achieve the desired position in the market. The company will form various strategies that will help in improving the performance.
- Benchmarking only supports in identifying the areas where there is a need for improvements. It does not contribute a bit in resolving the issues. It can just be the initial step to enhance the performance of the company.
- Benchmarking tool only compares the numbers. It does not consider the factors of macro and microenvironment that affect the performance and the reason behind the company’s success or failure (E-finance Management, 2018).
Conclusion
The above report has explained the concept of Total Quality Management which helps the organization in improving its performance in the market. This concept is very important for every organization to consider as without implementing the tools of TQM the company cannot give strong competition to its competitors. From the above analysis, it has been identified that the second position is not the only target of the company it always has to change to improve and grow. Therefore, it has been suggested above that Banks Sadler can adopt Quality Circle and Benchmark to reach the first position in the event management sector and to become the benchmark for other companies.
- It can be recommended that company should appoint a Quality management officer who can investigate and inspect all the process and help in identifying the gaps in the performance of the company.
- Banks Sadler should promote the charitable events and should charge fewer amounts from them. It will help the company in improving its public image in the market.
References
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