Quality management systems overview and implementation

Quality Management Systems

In the modern day dynamic and competitive business community, economic agents are forced to continually develop and implement strategies which improve and consolidate their competitive positions. As part of this endeavor, organizational entities place an incremental emphasis on the insurance of high levels of quality. Subsequently, this has materialized in an incremental focus on quality control and this emphasis is observed both within the academic community as well as within the practitioners' field.

Quality is generally understood in light of products and services in the meaning that it is expected that the items sold by the company to best satisfy the needs of the customer base. Yet, the aspects of quality go beyond the products and services. As an analogy, product quality is just the tip of the iceberg, the final result, created through quality commitment throughout the totality of organizational processes.

Quality management is a business model by which the entire organization is focused on operating is such a manner that it increases the quality of its final product. At the level of the manufacturing department for instance, emphasis is placed on compliance with quality standards, product functionality, product style and so on. At the level of the marketing department, emphasis is being placed on the creation and implementation of the most adequate and appealing marketing campaigns. At the level of the financial department then, emphasis is being placed on the adequate construction of the financial statements.

There are several models of quality control systems, each revealing its own advantages and disadvantages. What should however be remembered is that the specialized literature and the theoretical systems will not offer the perfect solution to an organizational conundrum. It other words, it is necessary for each organizational manager to develop and implement a quality control system tailored to the unique particularities of his company, such as the type of product or service delivered, the industry in which the company operates, its resource availably and so on.

Relative to Hartman Industries, the elements which should be taken into consideration in the creation of a new quality management system refer primarily to the global spreading of the organizational plants, which must all deliver high quality items, integrated within the same umbrella of organizational values, philosophies and customer expectations. Given this context, a model of centralized quality management is proposed. With its aid, the company's management would centralize all quality information within its headquarters and would continually train and delegate managers to the global plants and ensure that the quality standards adopted by the parent company are continually implemented and respected. In terms of the chart, the modification would occur in the sense of higher levels of integration of control across organizational plants and departments.

The plan for the centralized quality control would be implemented throughout four gradual stages, as follows: