- Discuss the importance of quality partnering and strategic alliances?
Answer:
- In case of any total quality and strategic alliance, quality partnering for mutual advantages are quite significant in almost all the industries. This concept can be understood in an easier way by understanding the logic behind the cooperation and working together. Suppliers, employees, business partners, competitors and customers may form those members who can participate in business activities.
- As the best decider of the quality is the customer in the market place, thus partnering plays a vital role in total quality. It is possible to have a continuous improvement in products and processes, customer satisfaction and having the healthier relationship with the customers and the suppliers with the help of external partnering between various organizations. While a better relationship between the various department and employees of the organization can be obtained with the help of internal partnering. When all these efforts are put together, it will help in improving the competitiveness of the organization.
- Also there has to be a new technology interaction to employees time to time for improving the performance of the organization quality.
- Discuss the various forms of quality partnering and strategic alliances. Focus on the process model.
Answer:
There are various forms of quality partnering and strategic alliances for the growth and success of any industries like-
- Customers:The external partnering with the customer will be more fruitful when the customers are involved in the early stages of product development cycle. They should be allowed to preview the design of the product, observing and trying the prototype models, provide their valuable feedback at each stage of product development and suggest any kind of product change if necessary.
- Internal Partnering:Development of an environment within the organization which brings all the employees, department, managers, and teams together to form a mutual supportive association for having the maximum efforts from the manpower of the organization is termed as internal partnering. This includes team to team partnerships, employee to employee partnerships and management to employee partnerships
- Suppliers:This partnering is aimed for creating trusting, loyal and reliable relationship which will be beneficial for all he partners at the same time focusing on the improvement of productivity competitiveness and quality.
- Potential Competitors: This kind of partnering is equivalent to the partnership with the customers and the suppliers which is dependent upon competitiveness. This is more favorable for small and medium sized firms but sometimes this concept is also being adopted by big firms.
- Global Partnering:It will be more beneficial for the firms which are focusing on the customers worldwide to have the close association with the suppliers worldwide.
- Discuss the importance of quality culture?
Answer:
The organizational culture of any firm is reflected by its value, behavior and attitude of employees, the principles of the firms. Therefore –
- The quality culture can be seen as one of the organizational value elements which provides an environment for facilitating the continuous quality improvement.
- Each organization tries to exceed the expectations of their customers.
- Due to competitiveness and globalization, customers have become more vigilant to the quality of the products. Thus, the firms need to focus on the quality improvement methods.
- If managers treat employees with trust, dignity, and respect, employees will be more likely to treat each other in this way, and trust, dignity, and respect in everyday interaction will become part of the organization’s culture.
- These traditions will be perpetuated both by the behavior of employees and by the stories they pass along to one another. This is why it is so important to establish a quality culture
- Commitment to quality cannot be faked. Employees know when management is just going through the motions. Changing an organization’s culture requires a total commitment and a sustained effort at all levels of the organization
- Explain the difference between traditional and modern quality cultures?
Answer:
The differences will be most noticeable in the following areas:
- Operating philosophy:
- Objectives
- Management approach
- Attitude toward customers
- Problem-solving approach
- Supplier relationships
- Performance-improvement approach
Traditional culture-
- It adopts short term objectives.
- More concerned about their need instead of costumer.
- Energy is spent on assigning blame.
- Supplier relation often adversarial.
Modern culture-
- It plans strategy for long term.
- Customer satisfaction is the primary motivation deriving continual improvement effort.
- Energy is spent on identifying the cost.
- They are seen partner in quality culture.
- How do you understand who is a customer?
Answer:
- There are many possible customers; buyers, users, influencers, administrators, and distributors.
- Any employee whose work precedes that of another employee is a sup- plier for that employee. Correspondingly, any employee whose work follows that of another employee and is dependent on it in some way is a customer.
- Say Employee A attaches several components to a printed circuit board and then hands the board to Employee B to connect the components. In this relationship, Employee A is a supplier for Employee B, and Employee B is a customer.
6. Explain customer defined value, value analysis and retention?
Answer:
Customer defined value:
For any organization it is very important to understand how the costumer define value. The value of a product or service is the sum of a customer’s perceptions of the following factors:
- Product 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
Above factors are very important to customers.
Customer define value is very popular at federal express. Federal Express developed a system of Service Quality Indicators (SQIs). These indicators reflect the customers’ views concerning their satisfaction with the performance of Federal Express. The list of SQIs is as follows:
- Delivery on the right day but after the promised time
- Delivery on the wrong day
- Unsuccessful trace of a package
- Customer complaints
- Proof of performance is missing
- Missed pickups from customers
- Damaged packages
- Lost packages
- Unanswered calls from customers (not answered within 20 seconds)
Value analysis:
The process used to determine what is important to customers is called customer value analysis. And it consist of 5 steps:-
- Determine what attributes customers value most- Ask customers to describe the attributes of the product or service. This can be done using a written survey, a telephone survey, one-on-one interviews, or focus groups.
- Assess your organization’s performance relative to the prioritized list of attributes
- Ask customers to rate all attributes of your product or service against the same attributes of a competitor’s product or service- It gives the information to the organization about how toimprove the attributes of its products or services in accordance with customer preferences.
- Rate the relative importance of the attributes- With the ranking from most important to least important Ask customers to prioritize the list of attributes identified in the first step.
- Repeat the process periodically- With time the customers preferences may change, as might the attributes of competing products or services.
Retention-
- Customer retention is a more accurate indicator of customer loyalty than is customer satisfaction
- Customer satisfaction is also important on its own but even the satisfied customers used to switch to the competitor therefore customer retention is more important to check the customers loyalty.
- To retain customers 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.
- Discuss product innovation models for customer retention?
Answer–
- Innovation is how organizations continually improve the quality and cost of their products as well as the quality of their services
- To retain customers the organization should be innovative in today’s competitive global environment.
- Here is well known example of Motorola company who failed to innovate there gadgets and Nokia took the advantage and took the customer base.
Praveen Gupta has developed an innovation model that organizations can use to keep products up-to-date, attractive, and relevant for the customers. It contains the following five process steps:
- Target the Opportunity – focus on customer need and innovate accordingly the product.
- Explore the Idea – make a research that the new innovation will be a successful idea or not.
- Develop Alternatives.- Develop a variety of alternatives for the innovation, prototypes, and test them thoroughly to determine which is the best.
- Optimize the Solution – Take the chosen alternative and optimize it for production and delivery.
- Commercialize the innovation – do a proper marketing of the product don’t let it fail because of improper marketing.
- Discuss employee empowerment?
Answer-
- Empowering employee is called employee empowerment.
- In this empowered employees are given ownership of the processes they are responsible for and the products or services generated by those processes.
- Empowered employees, employees with ownership, take pride in their work and the resulting products or services produced by it.
- Ownership creates a sense of urgency to continually improve processes, products, and services and to strive for customer delight because “my signature” is on the work
- Empowered employee will always care a lot about the quality of work like CEO or sometime more than the supervisor.
- Discuss leadership for quality?
Answer-
- It is something that applying the principles of leadership in such a way as to continually improve the performance of people, processes, and products.
- Leadership for quality is based on the philosophy that continually improving people, processes, and products will, in turn, improve the following:
- Quality
- Value
- Productivity
- Service
- Market share
- Longevity
- Return on investments
- Business expansion (more jobs and opportunities for advancement) .
- There are following key elements for leadership of quality
- Customer Focus.
- Obsession with Quality.
- Recognizing the Structure of Work
- Freedom through control
- Unity of purpose.
- Looking for faults in system.
- Teamwork.
- Continuing education and training.
- Emphasis on best practice and innovation.
10. How to lead for a better-quality change?
Answer-
Step 1– A change picture is a brief but compelling written explanation of the 5 Ws and 1 H of change: what, where, when, who, and why plus how.
The change picture should be put in writing to ensure that all organizational leaders convey the same message
Step 2– Once the change picture has been developed, it must be communicated to all stakeholders.
The authors recommend a two-step approach:
- give the change picture to stakeholders in writing and
- explain the change picture verbally at the team or department level.
Step 3-The purpose of the roadblock analysis is to identify all potential road- blocks that might impede implementation of the change initiative.
This step is accomplished by conducting face-to- face meetings with employees who are going to have to carry out the practical, day-to-day work of the implementation. It is important that the personnel involved in this step be supportive of the change initiative.
Step 4- The organization planned to move forward with the transition quickly so as to take advantage of some breaks that were available for only a brief period of time.
it simply identifies roadblocks that must be removed or mitigated before they can impede implementation of the change initiative.
Step 5- The implementation plan contains a comprehensive list of all tasks that have to be completed, a schedule with deadlines for each task, and a responsible party assigned to each task.
Step 6- In any case, even after developing a comprehensive and detailed implementation plan, organizational leaders should never assume that the process will simply take care of itself. Rather, they should monitor closely and quickly take any action necessary to remove impediments so that the momentum is not lost.
11. Social Networking.
1. University of Delaware Names New Engineering Dean.
LINK:1
My view– Accordingto an announcement by UD President Dennis Assanis and Provost Robin W. Morgan, Levi T. Thompson, the Richard E. Balzhiser collegiate professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan, was named dean of the University of Delaware’s College of Engineering.
As T. Thompson has two master’s degrees from the University of Michigan in chemical engineering and nuclear engineering and his doctorate in chemical engineering; its clear he is very experienced personnel having a numerous amount of knowledge and good reputation too. And his experience and knowledge will definitely productive for the students of UD.
Tasnuba Binte Nur’s view- University of Delaware announces its new Dean of Engineering effective on October 1st. Levi T Thompson who is now leading chemical engineering professor in University of Michigan will be the new engineering dean. UD was once Professor Thompson’s Alma matter. After leaving UD, Professor Thompson earned two master’s degree and PhD degree from Michigan University. His focus is on chemical engineering and nuclear engineering. He is going to lead the engineering department after Babatunde Ogunnaike who was dean since 2011.Professor Thompson is warm welcomed in UD and it is believed that his knowledge, vision and leadership will accelerate the prosperity of UD.
2. GE Summer Campers Learn STEM Technologies
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My view-According to a GE survey only 14% of all engineers and 25% of all IT professionals are women. Therefore, GE created a program in 2011, called GE Girls, at MITintroducing middle school girls to the world of science, technology, engineering and math. GE has a Women’s Network, which includes women leaders from each of its businesses globally, driving several initiatives, including partnering with the Society of Women Engineers to support engineering scholarships and working to increase the representation of women in technical entry-level leadership programs and in STEM roles.
From 2005 to till now GE has started so many stem courses in more than 20 universities including Milwaukee School of Engineering, Northeastern University, MIT, Howard University in Washington D.C. in numerous different fields from some hands-on experience in the laboratoriesto how to fly drones and fight back against cyber-attacks, and many more.
According to GE vice president Ann Kleeinvesting in women is invest in future. GE is still continuing its project and committed to its work where females will have every opportunity to get success in STEM world.
Tasnuba Binte Nur’s view- GE has started investing on STEM since 2005 and started focusing on Girl’s participation. In summer camps up to this year 2600 middle school students are introduced with STEM around the world.GE is partnering with 20 universities across USA is providing hands on experience to girls on Math’s, science, technology and science. MIT, Northeastern University, Milwaukee school of engineering ,Penn state, Howard university are some notable universities where girls students got the chance to work and experience on the wonders of STEM. Today’s girl’s involvement in STEM is really showing our political leaders, engineering entrepreneurs that our girls need more attention. Currently only 14% of all engineers and 25% of all IT professionals are women. Vice president of GE put full emphasis on girls training and participation in STEM for the fullest potential of our future workforce.
3. NMSU researchers strive to create transportation fuels from algae
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My view- Catherine Brewer who specializes in biomass processing and accepted the new challenge. Has done so many energy saving jobs and researches like ability to get energy out of wastewater treatment rather than only put energy, creating transportation fuels, ideally jet fuels, from materials such as algae at a high-temperature and high-pressure reactor at conditions near the critical point of water: 290-350 degrees Celsius (550-660 degrees Fahrenheit) and 100-200 atmospheres of pressure, and also done very nice group jobs such as different algae strains grown under slightly different conditions and see how much bio-crude oil we can get out of the biomass.
Her determination towards using waste and algae and developing fuel is very efficient for everyone. And her projects are joined my many universities and its people, for her achievement and success is working together with her team which grow algae and study the algae.
Tasnuba Binte Nur’s view- One of the Professors of New Mexico State University, Catherine Brewer and her team worked on a biomass project and they succeeded. This team was collaborated with other departments of NMSU and also some other departments of other schools. Instead of just putting energy into waste water they were able to produce some jet fuel from algae. The combined group used to cook different amount of algae in different conditions of high pressure and temperature in a special reactor. The process is known as hydrothermal liquefaction which involves conditions near critical point of water. According to Professor Brewer the challenging job of the project was to get the fuel of the just molecules with the right just properties. Professor Brewer has replaced a project of NMSU but successfully achieved the goals by substituting the reactor and self cleaning filters to remove solids and upgrades for system safety. The project has been started in 2015 and after joint efforts of multi universities and multi disciplines, the goal has been achieved. So it is a project of working together and sharing the success together.
(Reference from: Quality Management for organizational Excellence – introduction to quality: Edition Seventh and Eight by David L. Goetsch and Stanley B. Davis.)
Kartik Kumawat 