Dell Total Quality Management Questions

Dell Total Quality Management

Questions on Dell's Total Quality Management Strategy

What is TQM? Why it is important to your company?

Total Quality Management (TQM) is a foundational platform of enterprise- corporate-wide processes, procedures and programs designed to continually improve customer experiences and product quality. The foundational elements of TQM include cross-functional product design, a strong focus on customer involvement, committed leadership, cross-functional training, cross-functional product design, employee involvement, information and feedback, strategic planning, supplier quality management and process management (Rehder, Ralston, 1984). All of these factors are often coordinated to a common strategic plan to ensure the consistently high performance of an enterprise (Martin, 2004). They are indispensable to Dell as they have over a dozen business models concurrently with each other, each with unique supply chain, sourcing, procurement and manufacturing requirements. These concurrent business models make quality all the more difficult to attain yet paradoxically critical to the company's success. TQM is one of the strongest cornerstones of Dell.

How does TQM make a company's strategies more competitive?

TQM unifies every resource, department and division to a common objective of creating excellent products to meet and exceed customer's expectations (Rehder, Ralston, 1984). TQM is the fuel that also gives Dell the ability to create a continual stream of new products, designed around preferences and wants of customers, instead of just concentrating on needs or feature-based differentiation. Much of what Dell has achieved with its unique build-to-order business model and supporting supply chain synchronization is based on TQM-based principles and concepts (Martin, 2004). TQM then is the catalyst of what makes Dell so unique and competitive in a very challenging industry.

Explanation of How Dell implemented Deming's 7th Point (instituting leadership) with 3 examples.

Source: http://www.hci.com.au/hcisite2/articles/deming.htm

Dell's culture is known for being engineering-driven and very analytically-based. As a result the Deming's 14 Rules of Management are engrained into the quality management and engineering departments of the company, complete with analytics and metrics of performance reported showing progress towards Deming-based goals and objectives. The engineering-centric culture of the company is known for being very adept at quickly turning around new product ideas (Hammonds, 2003). Three examples of Deming's 7th point being put into account are Dell's aggressive move into the network services business, their continual evolution as a cloud computing services provider complete with their own training program, and the development of their world-class integrated supply chain (Dell Investor Relations, 2013) all illustrate how effectively the company is making use of the Deming philosophy.

List Juran's Trilogy functions, using an example from Dell's expertise with this concept.

The three trilogy functions of the Juran Trilogy include quality planning, quality control and quality improvement. (Godfrey, 2011) Dell uses these three areas to support and guide their enterprise-wide quality management programs at both the supply chain and production levels. Dell's cultural bias of measuring and quantifying as much as possible to ensure consistency and high performance is also reflected in how the company ahs adopted Juran Trilogy functions throughout their company (Dell Investor Relations, 2013).

What are the motivations of applying ISO-9000 within Dell to gain competitive advantage?

The ISO-9000 standard is foundational to the TQM frameworks and strategies at Dell, as the ISO framework guides the standardization of supply chain, sourcing and production quality management processes. ISO-9000 keeps the overall costs low of production while increasing quality and meeting customer needs (Dell Investor Relations, 2013).

What are the different leadership styles? Explains which one(s) apply to Dell.

There are transformational, transactional, democratic and authoritarian leadership styles present in any enterprise the size of Dell today. These vary by the type of managers and leaders there are in a given company. At Dell, transformational leaders are prevalent given the approach Michael Dell takes of allowing risk-taking, greater autonomy and support for decentralized decision making throughout the company (Dell Investor Relations, 2013).

Explain different supplier relationship practices you think will be an advantage to the company, providing examples.

There are many different approaches Dell takes in creating and sustaining their supplier relationships. There are supplier relationships for commodity-oriented products to entirely different ones for high-value products like microprocessors. Dell has been able to unify all of these using a common set of analytics and metrics of performance, creating a consistent approach to managing their diverse supply chain based on profitability contribution by supplier, not just price (Weisendanger, 1993).

Explain the different customer focus practices you think will be an advantage to the company including examples.

Dell is very attuned to its customers and their needs through the pervasive integration of the Sig Sigma core principles evident tin every aspect of their value chain. Dell uses the Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control (DMAIC) methodology to create a consistent customer focus in the design, engineering and production of their simplest to most complex products (Abramowich, 2008). DMAIC stresses concentrating on customer needs and requirements above all else first and this strategy has proven essential to Dell's success (AlSagheer, 2011).

TQM utilizes specific tools to resolve problems with processes. Explain one of the processes and the reason Dell is using this specific TQM tool resolve it? What conclusions did you get that improves the process?