GSOE9810 Engineering Quality Management Assignment 1, T1 2021

GSOE9810 Engineering Quality Management
Assignment 1, T1 2021
The Product that is Quality

(From your Textbook: S. Thomas Foster, Managing Quality: Integrating the Supply Chain and Business Week)
The message has gotten out. In recent years, hundreds of thousands have attended quality-related
training. Welcome to Quality, Inc. It is an amorphous industry of trainers and consultants, selling not
only advice but also courses, lectures, workbooks, videos, and more than a little folderol. "There are
lots of seminar serums, training transfusions, program prescriptions, and video vaccinations," states
Stanley Cheransky, of Gunneson Group International, Inc. One organization sells a $15,000 do-it-
yourself kit complete with 16 DVDs, 10 workbooks, a leader's manual, overhead transparencies, and
a five-day course to teach someone how to run the tapes.
Firms that once did little more than human resource training now fly the quality banner. "They've
moved to where the fish are biting," says George Labovitz, president of ODI, a consultancy group.
Even some quality associations, such as the American Society for Quality (ASQ), are raking in big
bucks from selling books, training, seminars, magazines, and conferences.
in this pell-mell rush some of the advice dispensed isn't of the highest quality says G. Howland
Blackiston, president of the Juran Institute. And, he implies, some of it is deliberately obscure. "It's
become an opportunity to make money. If people were offering a product senior managers could
understand, they would get laughed out of the boardroom." Adds Dean Silverman, executive vice
president of Temple, Barker and Sloane, Inc., "For some companies, the investment has paid off. For
many others, quality programs have turned out to be just another drag on the bottom line, costing
the buck without producing the bang."
For companies besieged by swarms of slick brochures and salespeople, this experience can be
bewildering. "There must be 20 pieces of mail a day from firms selling quality, and a lot of it is junk,"
states Mary Dolan, director of quality implementation at Campbell Soup Co. "There are few
consultants who can offer something new. Most of them are repackaging and selling the same ideas
and concepts." Of course, many companies sign up with new products in an effort to compete with
others in the world economy. Many firms also are pressuring their suppliers to sign up. "This is about
far more than the quality you build into a product," explains David Garvin, a professor at the Harvard
Business School. "It's a different set of ideas about management. There are not that many initiatives
where the CEO can stand up and say, 'this is mine and I can put my imprint on the company with it.'
Quality fits the bill."
The government's Baldrige award, too, has fueled the boom. Former Baldrige judges now staff
several consulting firms, such as the Juran Institute. These consultant groups help counsel clients
about how to win the award. The award itself has inspired many products, including books,
seminars, and videos.
Whatever the product, it's likely to be sold with the fervor of a religious cult. Each quality guru
boasts his or her own set of commandments, rituals, and disciples. Within each approach, corporate
managers are confronted by a numbing maze of acronyms and buzzwords. There is Six Sigma, Lean,
TQC, TQM, fishbone diagramming, cause and effect, poke yoke, big Q, and little q. "it's a lot of
alphabet soup," complained Deming.
Another shortcoming of consultant-driven approaches to improving quality is the overemphasis on

training seminars. "I have not met a client who said that training was enough to get things done,"
stated George Stalk, a well-known management consultant. "Transferring awareness into bottom-
line results is hard. Top management doesn't understand the limitations of much of the quality
advice."
Some say the same is true for other kinds of consulting. "A firm could send all of its employees to a
Tom Peters seminar, and they would all come back all fired up; but they would be ill-equipped to
make any changes in the organization," says David Quady, a consultant with Chevron's in-house
quality improvement group. "You need awareness, but then you need to provide education to
provide it."
The most successful companies have put their own stamp on quality campaigns, mounting their own
massive training efforts internally. "You can't buy these quality systems off the shelf," advises
Harvard's Garvin. "The most successful efforts tailor ideas to the organization. All the Baldrige
winners have developed their own house brands of quality." The bottom line is that firms must be
wary of the advice they are purchasing. The flashy, feel-good messages they are hearing may not
make them feel good in the long run. Alternatively, the fact that a flawed medium is used does not
render the message incorrect. There is much that is known about quality management. As well,
there is much still to be learned.
(From: S. Thomas Foster, Managing Quality: Integrating the Supply Chain and Business Week)
Your Task
1. Are clients getting what they want? Explain in one paragraph.

2. What do clients really want? Explain in one paragraph.
You and your team have decided to establish a start-up in this industry (quality advice to clients).
You have decided to apply issue analysis and critical thinking, based on what you are learning in
GSOE9810, to design and develop a strategy and process for helping your clients improve quality.
3. Incorporate your results from steps 1 and 2 into the issue analysis framework.
a. Start by clearly specifying the issue(s).
b. Next develop some innovative ideas and approaches that you think may work and
document these as your hypothesis in the issue analysis framework.
4. Now think about how you will convince a possible investor in your business (this could also
be You!) that your ideas (hypotheses and solutions to the issues) will work.
a. For this you will need understanding, knowledge and information about the issues,
about what your clients want and about your solutions. This information needs to
be described as well as where the data will come from and what analysis you will
perform on this data to provide the information.
5. Based on this analysis, design a process that you would like to offer your clients.
6. How much should a client pay for your advice?

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GSOE9810 Engineering Quality Management

The Product that is Quality

Another shortcoming of consultant-driven approaches to improving quality is the overemphasis on

1. Are clients getting what they want? Explain in one paragraph.

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