Essay: Quality Improvement Process

Stephen Covey states that, “Quality is improved through three processes a quality-improvement process, corrective-action process, and a customer-complaint resolution process. These processes involve everyone. Every person in the company gets the big picture.”  ( Covey, S. R. (1994) . A total approach to total quality. Retrieved October 28,2007, from http://www.franklincovey.com/fc/library_and_resources/article_library/total_quality). All of these three processes were missing from Baderman resort’s quality management. There was no quality-improvement process in place, no formal way of collecting customer feedback and no corrective-action processes in place. Therefore, Baderman resort was unable to document and quantify the variations in its quality. The investigation into quality was in fact initiated by an informal customer complaint process. The blog that displayed complaints was actually in place for another reason altogether. Therefore, we can see how Baderman resort’s faulty approach towards quality created problems for it.

Total quality management proposes a number of methods and contains a number of tools to quantify variations. This includes the use of statistical process control, which includes tools such as histograms, cause-and-effect diagrams, pareto diagrams, control charts, scatter or co-relation diagrams, run charts, and process flow diagrams. ( cited in Juran and Godfrey,1998). Other qualitative quality variation tools include regular feedback mechanisms from customers and benchmarking. Since total quality management entails the concept of totality in quality for the customer. Identifying process variations, or variations in quality becomes imperative to the providence of quality. A regular process chain starts from input and ends at the customer, however, a total quality process chain starts from the customer and ends at the input. TQM is a customer centric concept and satisfying customer concerns or taking feedback from customer lies at the heart of TQM.