Quality

Quality Control

Quality Assurance

Description

Description

Disadvantages

Disadvantages

Advantages

Advantages

Quality Circles

Quality Improvement

Description

Disadvantages

Advantages

Description

Disadvantages

Advantages

  • Any faulty products are filtered out
  • Helps maintain a good reputation
  • The business stays ahead of the competition
  • The business can react easily to changing external factors
  • Creates waste
  • The business can have high staff-development costs
  • High costs to rework
  • Employees may feel under pressure to continually keep improving

Inspecting finished products at the end of production to look for faults

This involves following a Japanese philosophy known as Kaizen, which states that everyone and every process in an organisation should constantly improve

  • Low waste
  • Easy to pinpoint where faults are occurring

Inspecting products at each stage of production to look for faults

This involves a group of employees meeting with a line manager to discuss problems in the production process and how to solve them, suggestions are then passes to management

  • Slows production
  • Expensive initially

Mystery Shoppers

Description

Disadvantages

Advantages

  • Employees will be motivated as they get to have a say in decision-making
  • No bias as shopper does not work for business
  • Can suggest improvements based on actual customer experience, not just intended customer experience
  • Management get well-informed suggestions from the workers who actually produce the product
  • Employees meet during paid company time, meaning production time is lost
  • Mystery shoppers are forbidden from sharing experience outside of the business

Anonymous individuals are hired to 'test' the customer service experience of a branch

  • Employees are often trained to join a quality circle, costing the business even more time and money
  • Staff may feel cheated by this 'sneaky' method
  • Mystery shopper may encounter a one-off error and report it, which is then assumed to be the norm
  • Businesses need to pay mystery shoppers

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Total Quality Management

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Advantages

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  • Zero errors means no waste

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  • Motivates staff
  • Reputation as perfect
  • Culture of teamwork

Disadvantages

  • Substantial staff training, to ensure no mistakes are made, will increase costs and result in lost work time

Description

A combination of various techniques including assurance, improvement and circles to attempt to bring errors to zero

  • Requires the commitment of all staff, stricter selection process
  • Processes need to be continually monitored and compared to policies and procedures, time consuming

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