Organizations depend on their customers and therefore should understand current and future customer needs, should meet customer requirements and strive to exceed customer expectations. Before we can begin to consider how a business manages quality, we must first have a clear understanding of what we mean by the quality. A quality product or service is one, which is fit for its intended purpose.



My understanding of big companies is that they have always recognized the need to ensure quality in the products and service they provide, and to achieve this they have traditionally operated Quality Assurance systems. These days there is now far greater emphasis on achieving quality within businesses than ever before. In fact many companies have noticed the importance of quality as key to their business success and have developed some type of quality system for the organizations. By developing such systems companies can achieve quality in every part of the company.

United Installations is a rain gutter company and has been in the business for over ten years. This company employs between seven to eleven employees depending on the season of the year. The first and most basic step in establishing our quality management program has been to formulate written requirements that specify the roles and responsibilities of each employee on each different project. Our manual establishes basic requirements. The project manager and the team for each job establish additional requirements.

Quality management should always start by applying a few project phases. Here are some that are used by our company (some times): Planning, Budgeting, Design, Estimates (bidding), Installation.

A project quality management we try to emphasis is to address technical issues, but also address the customer relationship and to encourage teamwork. Our Technical issues include checklists, inspections, interdisciplinary plan checks, and many other reviews. Our customer relationship is to understand our customers and provide what we can for their needs and also being polite and proper through the project. Teamwork is encouraging commitment to the project, building teamwork, defining expectations, and getting along. If at any time other companies are involved with our project the same process in practiced through the whole project.

Organizations big or small need to focus on researching the importance of enhancing customer satisfaction, understanding customer needs and expectations, and improving customer loyalty leading to repeat business by communicating with customers and satisfying their needs and expectations throughout the organization, finding what customers need to be satisfied with and acting on the results, and one other most important approach is to ensure balance between the customer and other parties involved, such as employees, phone communications, owner, and etc..

We can all establish unity of purpose and direction of the organization by creating and maintain the internal environment in which people can become fully involved in achieving the organization's objectives. Our activities should be evaluated, aligned and implemented in a unified way. Miscommunication between levels of an organization must be minimized since this has been one of the barriers of quality management.

As part of our discussion in class we talked about how organizations need to have a clear vision on the future of the company, the need of setting goals and targets, creating shared values and fairness, and having ethical role models at all level of the organization. I have noticed with our company and also working with other companies in the past that if we don't establish trust and eliminated the fear among employees, it not only works against the company also prevents them from getting the required training to freely act with responsibility and accountability. In class we also talked about how recognition of employees inspires and encourages them to contribute more to the organization.

Another area that I need to cover about our company is the need of creating a value system between the suppliers and everyone in our organization. This relationship balances short-term gains with long-term considerations. There have been times when both parties lacked in inspiring, encouraging and recognizing improvements and achievements in both companies. But with a little use of quality management that has been resolved.

There are many different ways of applying quality management. The nature of the organization and the specific challenges it faces will determine how to implement quality management. Many organizations will find it beneficial to set up quality management systems based on their principles.