General Motors' ignition switch recall and quality management failures

Changes at GM

The Quality Management Changes Needed At GM

General Motors knowingly sold cars with faulty ignition switches, endangering millions of customers and earning the company the dubious honor of topping the list of the most damaged brands in 2014. GM's knowingly selling cars with bad ignition switches led to a recall that could cost nearly $7B to resolve (Schmidt, 2014). Only after evaluating the final costs of the ignition switch recall and the follow-on costs from the 2009 bankruptcy will GM have a full scope of the total financial damages (Schmidt, 2014). Clearly there is a breakdown of the overall enterprise quality management and compliance (ECQM) systems and structures within GM today, as evidenced by the lack of oversight on the ignition switch quality levels and the apparent cover-up the company attempted on the issue as well (Schmidt, 2014). The GM fiasco shows just how costly ethical violations are and what lasting effects they leave with customers, across the financial condition of a business, and their brand (Verschoor, 2014),

Recommendations

For GM, just adding in an ECQM system is not going to be enough. There needs to be an en-masse shift in how quality is implemented throughout the business. Starting with supplier quality management, one of the foundational elements of a Total Quality Management (TQM) initiative (Hussain, Van Waveren, 2010), GM needs to redefine how they manage inbound traceability to the lot and device level, followed by completely redefining the analytics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) used for managing the overall supplier qualification and approval process (Hussain, Van Waveren, 2010). In short, GM needs to define the overall structure of tis supply chain to a level that will amount to reengineering it to be more focused on quality over expediency or convenience. As is often the case with very large corporations that have a large scale of success and financial stability, complacency sets in and makes the ethics of quality negotiable in managers' minds when in fact that is the most critical part of the value any business delivers (Verschoor, 2014). GM's lack of focus on quality due to complacency can be seen in the ignition switch issue in addition to many others (Schmidt, 2014).