Key Questions
How can quality be defined?
How can quality problems be diagnosed?
What steps lead towards conformance to specification?
How can statistical process control help quality planning and control?
How can acceptance sampling help quality planning and control?
How can quality be defined?
'Quality is consistent conformance to customers’ expectations.'
Operations have to ensure that they are able to manufacturer the product or deliver the service to a specification. They have to do this time after time, i.e. consistently, and in order to do this we need to have some means of controlling quality (see later). And, that specification should meet customers’ expectations, (see quality characteristics later), if it does not customers will likely be dissatisfied.
Although the operation may consistently create the product or service to that specification, the customer’s perceptions of its quality may be good or bad. So we also need to try to understand how customers will perceive the products and services.
In some situations customers may not be able to evaluate the technical quality of a product or service and may judge it on the way they were treated. Quality must therefore cover both the technical and treatment aspects.
How can quality problems be diagnosed?
There are two important points here:
Why customers might perceive quality to be different to their expectations. Such a mismatch could be caused by one of or a combination of other mismatches or gaps.
The responsibility for ensuring customers perceive good quality products or service is not just the responsibility of operation managers but also marketing to provide information about customers expectations and to provide the right image about the product or service to the market.
Product/service developers also have a role in ensuring that the right product or service is designed.
Read the Calling Sue case exercise at the end of the chapter to identify the gaps between customer expectations and perceptions.
What steps lead towards conformance to specification?
Defining the quality characteristics is important because not only should these equate to customer needs they also provide the specification against which operations can check and control that quality is being consistently delivered.
Deciding how to measure each characteristic is important, some will be easier to measure than others. Variables such as waiting time may be more straightforward compared to attributes such as how customers feel about the wait (OK or not OK). All the quality characteristics have to be measured to ensure conformance to expectations.
In some cases delivering perfect quality might be impossible or too expensive,
For example sometimes lecturers have off days and occasionally forget things! Operations managers have therefore to decide what will be acceptable standards for performance.
Having decided what is to be measured (the characteristics) and the standards to be achieved; operations managers have to design systems to ensure that the operation is delivering products or services to that specification.
The final step is to check that the operation is actually delivering quality to the set standard, usually by checking a sample of the products or services. This is called quality control and is death with in detail in the sections on statistical process control and acceptance sampling. It is important to realize that there are risks inherent in taking samples – these are called type I and type II errors. Familiarize yourself with what these errors mean and read the Surgical Statistics box.
How can quality be defined?
How can quality problems be diagnosed?
What steps lead towards conformance to specification?
How can statistical process control help quality planning and control?
How can acceptance sampling help quality planning and control?
How can quality be defined?
'Quality is consistent conformance to customers’ expectations.'
Operations have to ensure that they are able to manufacturer the product or deliver the service to a specification. They have to do this time after time, i.e. consistently, and in order to do this we need to have some means of controlling quality (see later). And, that specification should meet customers’ expectations, (see quality characteristics later), if it does not customers will likely be dissatisfied.
Although the operation may consistently create the product or service to that specification, the customer’s perceptions of its quality may be good or bad. So we also need to try to understand how customers will perceive the products and services.
In some situations customers may not be able to evaluate the technical quality of a product or service and may judge it on the way they were treated. Quality must therefore cover both the technical and treatment aspects.
How can quality problems be diagnosed?
There are two important points here:
Why customers might perceive quality to be different to their expectations. Such a mismatch could be caused by one of or a combination of other mismatches or gaps.
The responsibility for ensuring customers perceive good quality products or service is not just the responsibility of operation managers but also marketing to provide information about customers expectations and to provide the right image about the product or service to the market.
Product/service developers also have a role in ensuring that the right product or service is designed.
Read the Calling Sue case exercise at the end of the chapter to identify the gaps between customer expectations and perceptions.
What steps lead towards conformance to specification?
Defining the quality characteristics is important because not only should these equate to customer needs they also provide the specification against which operations can check and control that quality is being consistently delivered.
Deciding how to measure each characteristic is important, some will be easier to measure than others. Variables such as waiting time may be more straightforward compared to attributes such as how customers feel about the wait (OK or not OK). All the quality characteristics have to be measured to ensure conformance to expectations.
In some cases delivering perfect quality might be impossible or too expensive,
For example sometimes lecturers have off days and occasionally forget things! Operations managers have therefore to decide what will be acceptable standards for performance.
Having decided what is to be measured (the characteristics) and the standards to be achieved; operations managers have to design systems to ensure that the operation is delivering products or services to that specification.
The final step is to check that the operation is actually delivering quality to the set standard, usually by checking a sample of the products or services. This is called quality control and is death with in detail in the sections on statistical process control and acceptance sampling. It is important to realize that there are risks inherent in taking samples – these are called type I and type II errors. Familiarize yourself with what these errors mean and read the Surgical Statistics box.