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.
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.
- 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 |
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Focus on short-term profits. Often the methods used for maximize short-term profits have effect in the long run.
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The core philosophy is customer satification which focuses on the aim to exceed the expectation of customers.
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Adopt short-term objectives of which focus is on accomplicshment over next several weeks or months.
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Develope objectives strategically in both long- and short-term. And they also adopt objectives within the organizations.
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Employees do what they are told by managers. Managers give orders and enforce policiesm procudures and rules.
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Managers are the coaches of the team. They communicate with customers, build trust, provide training and recognize performance.
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Tend to look inward, concern more about organizations’ needs than those of customers.
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focus on customers’ need. Customer satification is the highest priority.
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Managers and employees tend to expend energy on deflecting or assigning blame instand of identifying the problem and wating for someone to solve it.
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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.
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The main pressure for a supplier is to bring down prices and speed up delivery, even it will drive the supplier out of business.
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Suppliers are viewed as partners. They work together cooperatively for the good of both and continually improve the performance.
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Triggered by problems.
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Continuously improve all the processes.
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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.
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:
- Determine what attributes customers value most Ask customers to describe the attributes of products or service without assigned priority.
- Rate the relative importance of the attributes After list all the customer expectations, organizations should ask customers prioritize the attributes.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
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:
- Commitment. Being consistently supportive of empowerment and reinforcing it in tangible ways.
- Leadership. Promoting empowerment by being a consistent role model, mentor and trainer.
- 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.
- 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:
- Create urgency Team leader explains the need for transformation.
- Create a coalition Recuit key sponsors to drive change.
- Develop a vision and strategy Establish business transformation strategy, drives and target.
- Communicate the vision Develope detailed stakeholder management and communication plan.
- Empower action Establish a strong and effective management system.
- Get quick wins Create incremental plans for the organizations based on transformation.
- Leverage wins to drive change Change management with new baseline.
- Embed in culture Keep trying on continually change in leadership to get better management
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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.
Let’s create a cleaner and greener future 