1.

Discuss the importance of quality partnering and strategic alliances

Partnering for mutual benefit is fundamental to total quality. The simplest way to understand the concept of
partnering or the strategic alliance is to think of it as working together for mutual benefit. Those who work together
may be suppliers, fellow employees, customers, and even businesses that are potential competitors. The maximum
benefits of partnering are realized when all parties in the chain of partners cooperate. Several benefits can be derived
from partnering. Partnering can lead to continual improvements in key areas as processes and products, relationships
between customers and suppliers, and customer satisfaction. Internal partnering can improve relationships among
employees and among departments within an organization. When taken as a whole, these individual benefits add up
to enhance competitiveness. Partnering is about creating cooperative alliances.

2.

Discuss the various forms of quality partnering and strategic alliances

The various forms of partnering are:

Internal partnering: Internal partnering is creating an environment and establishing mechanisms within it that bring
managers and employee, teams, and individual employees together in mutually supportive alliances that maximize
the human resources of an organization. Internal partnering occurs at the following three levels:

management to employee partnerships

team to team partnerships

employee to employee partnership

Partnering with suppliers: The goal 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. The
following points are mandatory requirements of supplier partnerships:

Supplier personnel should meet with buyer personnel.

The price only approach to buyer-supplier negotiations should be eliminated.

The quality of supplier products should be guaranteed by the suppliers quality processes.

The supplier should fully understand and be able to practice JIT.

Both partners should be capable to sharing information electronically.

Partnering with customers: The term customer as used in this section means the end user of the product in question
and buyer of a suppliers products. The key to success in partnering with customers is to get them involved early in
the product development cycle. Allow them to observe and even try prototype models. Get their feedback at every
stage in the product development cycle, and make any needed changes as soon as they are identified. When this

approach is used, customer satisfaction surveys can solicit feedback from a broader audience to verify the input
given earlier in the product development cycle.
Partnering with potential competitors: The rationale for partnering with potential competitors is the same as that for
partnering with suppliers and customers. This is a strategy that applies more frequently to small and medium sized
firms but it can also be used by even largest organizations. The most widely practiced type of partnership among
small and medium sized enterprises is the manufacturing network.

3.

Discuss the importance of quality culture

One must understand the concept of organizational culture to understand what is quality culture. An organizations
culture is the everyday manifestation of its underlying values and traditions. It 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.An organizations culture has the following elements:

Business environment

Organizational values

Cultural role models

Organizational rites, rituals, and customs

Cultural transmitters
A quality culture is an organizational value system that results in an environment that is conductive to the
establishment and continual improvement of quality. It consists of values, traditions, procedures, and expectations
and promote quality.
It is easier to recognize a quality culture than to define one. Organizations with a quality culture, regardless of the
products or services they provide, share a number of common characteristics as follows:

behavior matches slogans.

customer input is actively sought and used to continually improve quality.

employees are both involved and empowered.

work is done in teams.

executive level managers are both committed and involved.

sufficient resources are made available where and when they are needed to ensure the continuous improvement of
quality.

education and training are provided to ensure that employees at all levels have the knowledge and skills needed to
continuously improve quality.

reward and promotion systems are based are based on contributions to the continual improvement of quality.

fellow employees are viewed as internal customers.

suppliers are treated as partners.

peak performances of people, processes, and products is a top priority.

4.

Explain the difference between traditional and modern quality cultures

Organizations that develop and maintain a quality culture will differ significantly from those with traditional culture.
The differences will be most noticeable in the following areas:

Operating philosophy: Organizations that adopt a quality culture typically have less turnover at the top. This is
because such a philosophy encourages decision makers to stay in their positions long enough to either enjoy or
suffer the consequences of their decisions.

Objectives: Organizations with traditional cultures typically adopt short-term objectives. The focus is on what the
organization should accomplish over the next several weeks and months. Organizations that adopt a quality culture
plan strategically. They develop both long and short term objectives and they do so within the context of an
organizational vision.

Management approach: In organizations with traditional cultures, managers think and employees do. Managers are
seen as bosses who give orders and enforce policies, procedures and rules. In organizations with quality cultures,
managers are seen as coaches of the team. They communicate the vision, mission and goals, provide resources,
remove barrier, seek employee input and feedback, build trust, provide training, and reward and recognize
performance.

Attitude towards customers: Organizations with traditional cultures tend to look inward. They are most concerned
about their need than those of customers. Customer relations might actually be adversarial. Organizations with a
quality culture are customer-focussed. Customer satisfaction is the highest priority and is the primary motivation
driving continual improvement efforts.

Problem solving approach: When difficulties occur in organizations with a quality culture, the focus is on identifying
and isolating the root cause so that the problem and not just its symptoms can be eliminated. Problem solving is
typically a systematic process undertaken by teams, with input solicited from all stake holders.. The goal is is to
create solutions.

Supplier relationships:In organizations with a traditional culture, suppliers are kept at arms length in relationships
that are often adversarial. The maximum possible pressure is exerted on suppliers to bring down prices and speed up
delivery, even when such an approach is likely to drive the supplier out of businesses. In organizations with a quality
culture, suppliers are viewed as partners. Supplier and customers work together cooperatively for the good of both.

Performance-Improvement approach: In organizations with a traditional culture, performance improvement is an

erratic, reactive undertaking that is typically triggered by problems. In organizations with a quality culture, continual
improvement of processes, people, products, the working environment, and every other factor that effects
performance is at the very core of the operating philosophy.

5.

How do you understand who is a customer?

An organization uses certain processes by which it produces its products. People who interact with the company
prior to these processes taking place have been considered suppliers. Those who interact with the company after
these processes have produced the product have been viewed as customers. From this traditional perspective ,
customers and suppliers are both external entities. In a total quality setting, customers and suppliers exist inside and
outside the organization. Any employee whose work precedes that of another employee is a supplier for that
employee. Correspondingly any employee whose work follows that of another employee and is dependent on it in
the same way is a customer. A customer, whether internal or external, depends on suppliers to provide quality work
and produce quality products.
6.

Explain customer defined value, value analysis and retention.

Customer defined value: It is important for organizations to understand how customers define value. The value of a
product or service is the sum of a customers perceptions of the following factors:

Product or service quality.

Service provided by the organization.

The organizations personnel.

The organizations image.

Selling price of the product or service.

Overall cost of the product or service.

Whether customers are satisfied will depend on the sum of their perceptions relative to all of these factors. The issue
of customer satisfaction is complicated even more by the fact that different customers place a different priority on
these factors. The fact makes it even more critical that organizations maintain close, personal and continual contact
with their customers.

Customer value analysis: Organizations that dont know what their customers value run the risk of wasting valuable
resources and in turn improve the wrong things. The process used to determine what is important to customers is
called customer value analysis(CVA). The CVA process consists of the following five steps.

Determine what attributes customers value most.

Rate the relative importance of attributes.

Assess your organizations 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 competitors
product or service.

Repeat the process periodically.

Customer retention: Customer satisfaction is a fundamental cornerstone of total quality. Forward looking
organizations use customer satisfaction data to measure success. But measuring customer satisfaction is alone not
enough. Another important measure of success is customer relation. 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. The following strategies can help organizations go beyond just
satisfying customers to retaining them over the long term. These strategies will help organizations operationalize the
philosophy of turning customers into partners.

7.

Be proactive-Get out in front of customer complaints.

Collect both registered and unregistered complaints.

Discuss product innovation models for customer retention

In order to retain customers over the long term in todays hyper competitive global environment, organizations must
innovate. If the key to customer loyalty is consistently providing superior value-superior quality, superior cost and
superior service-the key to providing superior value is innovation. Innovation is how organizations continually
improve the quality and cost of their products as well as the quality of their services. It is how they continually
reduce the cost of doing business while increasing the volume of business they do.
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 identifying customer needs and use them to guide innovations.

Explore the idea: Conduct a through research to ensure that the proposed innovation will be successful in
the marketplace.

Develop alternatives: Develop a variety of alternatives for the innovation-prototypes-and test them
thoroughly to determine which is the best.

8.

Optimize 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.

Discuss employee empowerment

Employee involvement and empowerment are closely related concepts, but they are not the same. In a total quality
setting, employees should be empowered. There are important differences between involvement and empowerment.
Involved employees are given ownership of their jobs. Empowered employees are given ownership of the processes
they are responsible for and the products or services generated by those processes. Empowered employeesemployees 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. An empowered employee will care as much as even more about the quality
of the work than the supervisor.

9.

Discuss leadership for quality

Leadership can be defined in many different ways, partly because it has been examined from the perspective of so
many different fields of endeavor. Leadership has been defined as it applies to the military, athletics, education,
business, industry, and many other fields. Leadership is ability to inspire people to make a total, willing, and
voluntary commitment to accomplishing or exceeding organizational goals. Leaders inspire others to commit to
something bigger than themselves-the organizations vision, mission and goals. They do so using the following
leadership techniques:

Aligning personnel with the vision.

Provide a sense of direction.

Communicating effectively and often.

Empowering.

Training and mentoring.

10. How to lead for a better quality change?

Leadership for quality is leadership from the perspective of total quality. It is about applying the principles of
leadership set forth in the preceding section 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
business expansion
return on investment
The key elements of leadership for quality include the following:
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 practices and peak performance.
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