Assignment 2

A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship.

–John D. Rockefeller Jr.

1. Importance of quality partnering and strategic alliances

Partnership based on mutual benefits is fundamental to total quality. The benefits of partnering are most realised when all parties in the chain of partners cooperate. When the partnering exists, the invisible walls between the supplier, manufacture and customers are removed. This enables the manufacturers to better understand what the end-user likes or dislikes, what the product might be used for and makes the modifications accordingly. So, because of partnership, the manufacturer better understands what the market needs and the supplier can help manufacturer in realising the demands.

Contemporary supplier-customer chain

With contemporary supplier-costumer relationship, there is communication, input, feedback and cooperation. Benefits of partnering include, improvement in processes and products, customer satisfaction, improves relationship among employees and various departments.

2. Different forms of quality partnering and strategic alliances

Potential Partnership Participants

 

Innovative Alliance and Partnerships

A group of small and medium-sized companies may come together to save money through consortium-buying. In this, two or more companies get together to buy common equipments in bulk: by doing so, they gain the cost benefits of size.

Another type of innovative partnership involves suppliers and their customers. Major customers agree to welcome an in-house supplier representative who works with the customers to continually improve the supplier-customer relationship. It gives the customers an advocate who sees what is needed from the supplier, when, where and why. It provides the supplier with firsthand knowledge of how to better serve the costumers.

Another innovative partnership called the Costumer Focus group, is a partnership between supplier and user of its products or services. A focus group consists of customers who are pulled together by a supplier to provide feedback about an existing product or services or input about a proposed product or service.

Internal Partnering

Internal partnering creates an environment and establishes mechanisms within it that brings managers and employees, teams and individual employees together in a mutually supportive alliance that maximise the human resources of an organisation. There should be a mechanism through which employees can channel their ideas for improvement. This partnership enables partners to help each other and perform better.

Partnering with Suppliers

The goal of such a partnership is to create and maintain a loyal, trusting,reliable relationship that will allow both partners to win,  while promoting the continuous improvement of quality, productivity and competitiveness. Qualifying a supplier for this partnership ensures that the products will be delivered when and where they are needed in the specified quantity and without inherent defects.

Partnering with Customers

Forming partnership with customers helps ensure the customer satisfaction and increases the competitiveness as the continuous feedback helps improve the products and services.

Partnering with Potential Competitors

Partnering with a potential competitor has the same rationale as partnering with suppliers and customers. The most commonly practiced partnership among small and medium enterprises is the manufacturing network, in which individual SMEs cooperate in ways that increase their quality, productivity and resultant competitiveness to levels that exceed what the individual companies could achieve on their own.

Education and Business Partnerships

There are two critical factors in continually improving the performance of an organisation: quality of employees and quality of human interaction with the technology. Individuals who lack fundamental work skills cannot perform at globally competitive levels. Moreover,individuals lacking process skills cannot make the most out of the technologies available to them.

3.Importance of Quality Culture

A quality culture is an organizational value system that results in an enviroment that is conducive to the establishment and continual improvement of quality. It consists of values, traditions, procedures, and expectations that promote quality.

The quality shows up in how employees behave at work, what their expectations are of the organization and each other and what is considered normal in terms of how employees approach their jobs. It also contains four elements:

• Business enviroment  The enviroment an organization operate in is a critical determinant of its culture.
• Organizational values  They are used to describe what the organization thinks is important, or to say the heart and soul of its culture.
• Cultural role models  When these models still active, employees in the organization serve as living examples of what they want their employees want to be.
• Organizational rites, rituals, and customs  These stand for how employees dress, interact with each other, and approach their work. They are enforced most effectively by peer pressure.
• Cultural transmitters  Transmitters are how organization’s culture is passed down through successive generations of employees.

Organizations with a quality culture, regardless of the products or services they provide, share some common characteristics which can help organizations stand out in competitive environment with high quality and the willingness and ablity to serve customers well in business world. 

4. Difference between Traditional and Modern quality cultures

Traditional Culture

Quality Culture

Operating Philosophy

Focus on short-term profits. Often the methods used for maximize short-term profits have effect in the long run.

The core philosophy is customer satification which focuses on the aim to exceed the expectation of customers.

Objectives

Adopt short-term objectives of which focus is on accomplicshment over next several weeks or months.

Develope objectives strategically in both long- and short-term. And they also adopt objectives within the organizations.

Management Approach

Employees do what they are told by managers. Managers give orders and enforce policiesm procudures and rules.

Managers are the coaches of the team. They communicate with customers, build trust, provide training and recognize performance.

Attitude toward Customers

Tend to look inward, concern more about organizations’ needs than those of customers.

focus on customers’ need. Customer satification is the highest priority.

Problem-Solving Approach

Managers and employees tend to expend energy on deflecting or assigning blame instand of identifying the problem and wating for someone to solve it.

The focus is on identifying and isolating the root cause so that the problem, especially the root of the problem can be eliminated. The goal is to create solutions.

Supplier Relationships

The main pressure for a supplier is to bring down prices and speed up delivery, even it will drive the supplier out of business.

Suppliers are viewed as partners. They work together cooperatively for the good of both and continually improve the performance.

Performance-Improvement Approach

Triggered by problems.

Continuously improve all the processes.

5. How do you understand who is a customer?

In the traditional way, organizations, especailly in manufacturing area, regard customer as the end users. They are the people who use the finished products and services. That is to say, organizations, only interact with external suppliers and customers.

Contemporary View

Traditional View

In contemporary view, as shown in the figure above, customers and suppliers exist both inside and outside the organization. Any one whose work precedes to another employee can be regarded as a supplier. The later employee, correspondingly, is the customer. The quality of work provided by previous supplier has or decide the later employee’s quality of the work. They should work together like traditonal manufacturing companies with external customers and supliers so that they provide quality work and quality products.

6. Customer defined value, value, analysis and retention

Customer defined value is important for organizations. It is a sum of a customer’s perceptions of several factors:

• Prodcut or service quality
• Service provided by the organization
• The organization’s personnel
• The organization’s image
• Selling price of the product or service
• Overall cost of the product or service

All these factors are important to customers. The products from an organization should make contribution to customers’ needs, even exceed the expectation. There values, especially the personal, image has strong effect on relationship between organizations and customers. If the products are good enough while the customers do not like the people there, customers still are likely to defect the competition. Customer value analysis (CVA) consists of five steps:

1. Determine what attributes customers value most  Ask customers to describe the attributes of products or service without assigned priority.
2. Rate the relative importance of the attributes  After list all the customer expectations, organizations should ask customers prioritize the attributes.
3. Assess your organization’s oerformance relative to the prioritized list of attributes  The relative strength of the attributes of a given product or service will math the priorities.
4. Ask customers to rate all attributes of your product or service against the same attributes of a competitor’s product or service  To survive in the competition, an organization’s product or service should have more value. By doing so, organizations can determine how the customers value their products and services so that they can improve the attributes of the products and services.
5. Repeat the process periodically  Customer perference might change, so it is important to periodically repeat the CVA process.

Customer retention is the index of customer loyalty rather than satisfaction. Customer retention is the desired end which means customers are not only satisfied with your product and service but also willing to come back when it is necessary next time as described below:

To retain customer over the long term, organizations must turn them into partners and proactively seek their input rather than waiting for and reacting to feedback provided after a problem has occurred.

7. Discuss product innovation models for customer retention

Innovation is a key to customer loyalty, a key to provide superior cost and a key to continually improve the quality and cost of their products as well as the quality. There are five process steps in this model.

• Target the Opportunity  Focus on identifying customer needs and use them to guide innovations.
• Explore the Idea  Conduct a thorough research to ensure that the proposed innovation will be successful in the marketplace.
• Develop Alternatives  Develop a variety of alternativs for the innovation and test them thoroughly to determine which is the best.
• Optimaize the Solution  Take the chosen alternative and optimize it for production and delivery.
• Commercialize the innovation  Develop and deploy an effective marketing program for the innovation. Never let an innovation fail for lack of effective marketing.

An additional point should be addressed here is that creativity is not the same as innovation.
The innovation has not occured until the product is produced and market.

8. Discuss employee empowerment.

Employee empowerment is not only close to employee involvement, but is deeper. Involvement means employees are asked by the organizations to input information but empowerment, further, gives them ownership of the jobs.  This onwership makes them pride of their work, pride of the quality of the products and service,  pride of his or her name is signed ont the work.

In the employee empowered organizations, managers provide an open, nonthreatening, creative environment and employees get involved physically, intellectually, and emtionally. In such situations, employees will be more willingly to observe, sense and ponder the following questions. 

• Why is it done this way?
• How could it be done better?
• Will the customer want the product like this?

By answering these questions, employees will continually improve the quality of the products and service. Thus, empowerment is a core role in total quality enviroment because it is human who gets the work done and makes the service performed.

Manager’s Role in empowerment

 

 

Even the benefits are obvious, there are still some resistence from every part.
First, employees may feel uncomfortable with the changes in their jobs. Unions, a tradional way to balance employees and companies might find that they are useless in these new relationshops. Finally, managers will hava a lot of worries in the empowerment such as:

• Fear of losing control
• I’m-the-Boss syndrome
• Outdated management training
• Old-school syndrome
• Faer of exclusion

These resistances can be easily overcame by three steps:

1. Commitment. Being consistently supportive of empowerment and reinforcing it in tangible ways.
2. Leadership. Promoting empowerment by being a consistent role model, mentor and trainer.
3. Facilitation. Monitoring constantly to ensure that employees are being empowered and acting quickly on employee recommendations.

9. Discuss leadership for quality

To discuss the leadership for quality we need first to define leadership as a quote from our textbook:

Leadship is the ability to inspire people to make a total, willing, and voluntary commitment to accomplishing or exceeding organizational goal.

The key concept is inspiring people to exceed the goal. That is the philosophy of continually improving peopel, processes and products. Improvement on these areas can also, in turn, to improve quality, value, productivity, service, market share, longivity, business expansion and return on investment. There nine elements in the concept of leadership of quality

• Customer Focus  This means the organization’s primary goal is to meet or exceed customer expectations in a way that gives the customer lasting value.
• Obsession with Quality  Every employee aggressively pursues quality in an attempt to exceed the expactations of both internal and external customers.
• Recognizing the Structure of Work  To optimize the structure in the work place, the work process should be analyzed, evaluated, and studied continually in an attempt to improve them.
• Freedom through Control  Leaders must ensure that managers and employees take control of work process and methods by collaborating to standardize them.
• Unity of Purpose  When there is unity of purpose, all employees pull together toward the same end.
• Looking for Faults in Systems  85% of the failure is because of the management failure. So leadership should focus on correcting systemic problems.
• Teamwork  A team of people working together toward a common goal can outperform a group of individuals working toward their own ends.
• Continuing Education and Training  In the age of high technology, it is necessary to wrok hard and work smart.
• Emphasis on Best Practices and Peak Performance  Leaders emphasize identifying and deploying best practices as one more way to ensure consistent peak performance.

 10. How to lead for a better quality change?

Leading Quality Change model, promoted by John P. Kotter, is a six steps procedure which presented in our text as follows:

• Develope a compelling change picture
• Communicate the change picture to all stakeholders
• Conduct a comprehensive roadblock analysis
• Remove or mitigate all roadblocks identified
• Implement the change
• Monitor and adjust

But for now, when you searching online, the majority of organizations will descripe the model as a eight steps one. The difference here is that the more popular one contains the idea of sustaining change which, in another word, is continually improvement in quality. This model is briefly demonstrated in Figure 2.8 as below:

Leading for a better quality change

Leading Change by John P. Kotter

1. Create urgency  Team leader explains the need for transformation.
2. Create a coalition  Recuit key sponsors to drive change.
3. Develop a vision and strategy  Establish business transformation strategy, drives and target.
4. Communicate the vision  Develope detailed stakeholder management and communication plan.
5. Empower action  Establish a strong and effective management system.
6. Get quick wins  Create incremental plans for the organizations based on transformation.
7. Leverage wins to drive change  Change management with new baseline.
8. Embed in culture  Keep trying on continually change in leadership to get better management

Social Networking aricles

Dyson Air Manipulator

Dyson introduced all-powerful air manipulator which incorporates the functionalities of air purifiction, heating and cooling. For purification purposes, it uses a 360-degreee HEPA filter which is capable of detecting pollutants such as pollens, molds and bacteria. The air quality parameters can be controlled via a Dyson link app, allowing users to monitor the air quality without having to walking up-to the air manipulator time and again. The funnel shape enables the air stream tto accelerate over an airfoil, thereby making the product more economical in terms of power consumption compared to a conventional fan used to maintain the air-flow over that same area. The only safety hazard I am worried about is that over the period of operation, inside surface of the funnel heats up. Making it dangerous in an environment with kids around.

Reference article            Detailed Discussion

Mitsubishi Crowd Simulator

While simulating crowds, observed human behavior and interactions are taken into account to replicate collective behavior. It is a method of creating virtual cinematography. It predicts the congestion in agathering and simulates the movements of all the entities, enabling it to detect any movement which is out of a normal simulation. This feature helps identifying any threat and increses the safety of a gathering by preventing any possible deadly stampedes. The system developed by Mitsubishi collects camera data and simuator algorithm focuses on nearby people instead of the whole crowd. This system was deployed for testing at Tokyo’s Tamagawa Fireworks festival and showed a success rate of 80%.

Reference article       Detailed Discussion

Recycling Carbon fibers with 100% efficiency

Researchers at Georgia Tech. have come up with a method to recycle almost 100 percent of the materials in certain types of thermoset carbon fiber composites. During the new process, the carbon fiber composites are soaked in alcohol, which slowly dissolves the epoxy that binds and gives shape to the carbon fibers. Once dissolved, the researchers can separate the carbon fibers and the epoxy and use them for new applications. According to the researchers, polymer matrix is intrinsically crosslinked which maks it hard to strip the polymer and reclaim the carbon fibers.

Carbon fibers containing vitrimer epoxies was used for the studies. Vitrimers contain dynamic bonds that modify their structure without affecting the network integrity. Alcohol, which has small molecules, participates in the network of alternating reactions, which effectively dissolved the vitrimer. This new recycling process has the potential to reduce the thousands of tons of carbon fiber waste generated each year.

Reference Article                   Detailed discussion

Assignment 1

In the consumer driven industry, Quality is a dynamic state associated with products, services, people, processes and environment that meets or exceeds expectations and helps produce superior value

What is TQM?

Total quality management is an industrial approach which treats the continuous improvement of all aspects of an organization, people, products, services, environment as a long term process rather than a short term goal. With TQM, anything and everything that affects quality is a target for continual improvement. the end result of this approach is an organizational excellence, superior value, and global competitiveness.

How can Organizational excellence be achieved?

The organizational excellence via Total Quality management approach can be achieved by keeping in mind the following characteristics:

1. Commitment and direct involvement of highest-level executives in setting quality goals and policies, allocation of resources, and monitoring of results.
2. Realization that transforming an organization means fundamental changes in basic beliefs and practices and that this transformation is everyone’s job.
3. Building quality into products and practices right from the beginning.
4. Understanding of the changing needs of the customers, and stakeholders, and satisfying them in a cost effective manner.
5. Instituting leadership in place of mere supervision so that every individual performs in the best possible manner to improve quality and productivity, thereby continually reducing total cost.
6. Eliminating barriers between people and departments so that they work as teams to achieve common objectives.
7. Instituting flexible programs for training and education, and providing meaningful measures of performance that guide the self-improvement efforts of everyone involved.

The following are the pillars of organizational excellence:

Six Pillars of Organizational Excellence

What is the Deming cycle?

The Deming Cycle links the production of a product with consumer needs and focuses the resources of all the departments – research, design, production, marketing – in a cooperative effort to meet those needs. The Deming cycle proceeds as follows:
1. Conduct and use the consumer research in planning a new product.
2. Manufacture the product.
3. Analyse the product to ensure that it was produced in accordance with the plan.
4. Put forth the product in the market.
5. Analyse the consumers’ reactions in terms of quality, cost and other relevant factors.

What are some common errors while starting a quality initiative?

Organizations that succeed, never approach total quality as a new way of doing business. Following are the common errors organizations make when implementing total quality:

1. Organizations delegate the responsibilities of a quality initiative to a hired expert rather     than applying the leadership necessary to get everyone involved.
2. Working in teams is an approach that must be incorporated gradually. Managers should      learn how to be effective coaches and employees must learn how to be an effective team player. Rushing in and putting everyone in a team will create problems instead of solving them.
3. Usually organizations develop quality initiatives without developing plans for integrating them into all elements of the organization.
4. Some organizations take a narrow approach by incorporating just the Deming approach, Juran or Corby approach and use the principles only prescribed in them. None of these approaches is a truly one-size fits all proposition. Experts encourage organizations to tailor the programs to their needs.
5. Making employees aware of quality and inspiring them to embrace it at a philosophical level are necessary steps in the right direction. But helping them develop the actual skills critical to implement the concept should be a part of a transformational process.

What is the cost of poor quality?

Many executives adopt the understanding that maintaining the quality is good until hard times roll in and cutting costs is necessary. Usually during hard times, quality initiatives are the first thing to go. What executives in such companies fail to comprehend is the costs associated with poor quality. The cost cutting by eliminating some quality initiatives does decrease the overhead, but they also bring about the unplanned consequences of disrupting product and service’s ability to satisfy the customers and reducing the company’s potential to develop any new business in the near future.

What are the quality characteristics of a World Class organization?

It is often said, that the World class organizations can compete in global marketplace. The characteristics of which are as follows:
1. Customer Service
2. Quality control and assurance
3. Research and development
4. Acquiring new technologies
5. Innovation
6. Team based approach
7. Best practices (Study and Use of)
8. Manpower planning
9. Environmentally sound practices
10. Business partnerships and alliances
11. Reengineering of processes
12. Mergers and acquisitions
13. Outsourcing and contracting
14. Reliance on consulting services
15. Political lobbying

Responsibility and Total Quality

Accepting responsibility  is an important aspect of ethical behavior. People in today’s society outright blame others for any shortcomings on their part. Modern society has evolved into one that focuses on rights but ignores the responsibilities that must accompany those rights. In a total quality setting, people are responsible for their actions and accountable for their performance. Accepting responsibility helps build trust, integrity, and all the other elements of ethics that are important in a total quality environment.

Models for ethical quality decisions

1.Categorical imperative model: There are only two decisions. They are right is right and wrong is wrong and there is nothing other than that.
2.Full disclosure method: Decision should answer the simple question whether it will satisfy the stakeholders in this method
3.Doctrine of the mean model: In the situation where there two extremes and then the decision need to be made then the common or neutral method is adapted.
4.Golden Rule method: In this method, the decisions are made on basis of mutual understanding where the decisions are made from previous decisions.
5.Market-ethic model: This is a market-based model where the model made which gives us profit, is the perfect model irrespective of the type.
6.Organizational ethic model: This is based on the organizational loyalty and the ethics all are based on the organization.
7.Equal freedom model: This model gives freedom to follow any ethics unless and until it interferes with stakeholders.
8.Proportionality ethic mode: This model follows that the world is so complex and decisions are made clearly right or wrong

Manager’s role in Quality Ethics

Managers are duty bound to make ethical decisions. In real world, deciding what is ethical is much easier than actually doing what is ethical. Managers are responsible for setting higher standards of ethics, setting a consistent example of example of exceeding those standards and acting immediately when they observe an unethical behavior.

Companies should be Sustainable and Green

With the advent of industrialisation, mankind has indiscriminately dumped waste and by-products into various ecosystems. The one that is most affected by it is the marine ecosystem. Industries related to paper, clothing, and almost everything we use in today’s world, release the toxic remains of their products into a nearby river, lake, or an ocean. The marine ecosystem is highly dependent on the currents. These currents keep the water in vast oceans circulating and in turn regenerates the oxygen level in it by passing the water through various plants and reefs. So, when the industry dispenses its waste products into this very water flow, these harmful, toxic remains latch into the water circulation, thereby making the water unfit for the marine life and plants alike. This scenario could very well be compared with a hypothetical case when an air conditioner begins circulating air filled with dust and particulates and it gets suffocating for us humans to stay in that place. With this statement, I have attached links to some videos by Professor Paul Ranky which document the serene and resplendent marine ecosystem which disparate creatures and plants call home. I implore upon the board to take firm steps to not only make our operations more sustainable, but green too.

Marine life 1  Marine life 2  Marine life 3  Marine life 4  Marine life 5  Marine life 6

Instead of directly discharging various chemicals and agents into the water, they should first be treated so as to neutralize their toxic nature. The solid waste generated should be sorted to separate the recyclable matter and non-recyclable matter. The solid waste finally to be dumped, should be packed tight into a compact shape and buried in pre-prepared land pits. This way, instead of just littering the soil, we can maintain the beauty and sustenance of the forests and make the environment cleaner.

Social Networking Articles

New P100D Tesla Model S goes harder, lasts longer

The Model S P100D with Ludicrous mode is the third fastest accelerating production car ever produced, with a 0-60 mph time of 2.5 seconds. the article linked below talks about development and the improvements with the battery life which provides an extra 10 kWh. This feature in turn enables the car to glide 315 miles in a single charge, making it a reliable long range electric car available in today’s automobile market.

Reference Article

Detailed Discussion

Carbon and titanium lighten the load for driver-focused Lotus Evora 400

The article linked below discusses the new Lotus Evora 400 model. The company has made some unconventional changes to this car by producing the roof, mirror caps, front splitter elements and rear diffuser trims with carbon fiber instead of aluminum traditionally used. This feature has made the car lighter (a weight reduction of 42 kg), in turn enhancing its responsiveness without affecting its torsional rigidity and fuel efficiency.

Due to the reduced weight, the new  model is a whole 7 seconds faster than the previous one along with the reduced stopping distance. Moreover, the combination of carbon and titanium makes the car stronger and harder, since titanium is one of the strongest alloys available.

Reference Article

Detailed Discussion

Separating study sessions with sleep may be the key to exam success

Early to bed
Early to rise
Makes a man
Healthy
Wealthy
and Wise.
Now, we’re all young and passionate and vigorously looking to make loads of money, but let’s talk about the last attribute the poet states that the sleep can give a man. Indeed, proper periods of sleep does make one wise! In the reference article linked below, one of the research scientist states “Memories that were not explicitly accessible at the beginning of relearning appeared to have been transformed by sleep in some way. Such transformation allowed subjects to re-encode information faster and to save time during the relearning session.” Furthermore, follow-up tests suggest that the beneficial effects of the learning technique persist for at least six months after the sessions.

Personally, I too agree with the conclusion of this research. Long periods of studying tires up the brain and it begins playing tricks on us by remembering erroneous facts and mixing up some details. Taking short naps helps the brain to compartmentalize the information enabling it to retain for longer periods.

Reference Article

Detailed Discussion