Customers and, crucially, their perceptions about what they receive, are the key objective of TQM. Achieving customer delight (advocates of TQM and excellence argue that satisfaction is too limited (see below), is not an easy task; it will need considerable effort by every person involved in the supply chain. However, if there is any doubt about the importance of the customers, and of people in meeting their needs, it is worth remembering that those organisations that have found difficulty in trading in recent years usually discover that what they provide is no longer considered to be value for money. As such organisations also `suddenly' find, there are others capable of doing it better or cheaper, and not infrequently, both. Analysis of howit is possible for organisations to
Search for excellence
(external focus – need to benchmark)
• Continuous improvement
• Empowering people
• Caring for people
• Involvement
• Compliance with specification
• Allocating blame
Total Quality Management
• Obsession with customer satisfaction
• Involvement of every person (including suppliers and subcontractors)
• Improvement of every aspect of production/service
• Teamwork
• Measurement and improvement of processes
Quality Assurance
• Use of systems such as ISO 9000
• Quality planning and development of procedures
• Auditing of compliance with procedures Quality Control
• Retrospective checking
• Requirement for paperwork to demonstrate that control has occurred
Inspection
• Salvage
• Corrective action
• Identify faults and those responsible Minimum desire to comply
(internally focused – solutions can be imposed) Fig. 3.5 Development of Quality Management.
be able to effectively `steal' customers, strongly indicates that there is a combination of two things:
(1) Knowing how to refine the processes by which the product or service is created
(2) A focus on the use of people by which these processes can be operationalised and continuously improved
The central principle of TQM is that the process of improvement begins with the customer and `ends'17 with the customer. If an organisation does not know what its customers really want to receive, howcan it ensure it meets their expectations? More crucially, if the organisation is unclear about its customer's expectations, howcan it ensure that its employees are working in such a way as to ensure the attainment of such expectations?
Deming believed that the most important measure of an organi- sation to perform was not just its ability to achieve customer satis- faction, but customer delight. The former, he explained, is passive and suggests an intention merely to `do enough'. As this book will stress, organisations that achieve the status of being regarded as
`world class', do so on the basis of consciously aiming to go beyond satisfaction. Such organisations are notable because of the apparent determination by employees, regardless of hierarchical level, to pursue proactive strategies in order to create value-adding at every stage. The ultimate objective of doing this is to create delight for customers at every contact they make with the organisation. As a test, the next time you contact an organisation, consider the way you were treated. For instance, how did the person who answered the telephone treat you? If you visited the premises of this organi- sation, was the way in which you were dealt with by its staff ± from reception onwards ± courteous, and such as to indicate that they valued your custom?
The treatment a customer receives, particularly at the first point of contact, is something that Jan Carlzon of Scandinavian Airways Systems (SAS) called the `moments of truth'. Carlzon was appoin- ted president of SAS in 1981 when it was making an annual oper- ating loss of $20 million. Clearly this was an organisation in great difficulty. Amazingly, within a year, Carlzon had turned this loss into an operating profit of $54 million by the concept of `moments of truth'. As Carlzon explains:
Last year, each of our 10 million customers came into contact with approximately five SAS employees and contact lasted an average
of 15 seconds each time. Thus, SAS is `created', in the minds of our customers 50 million times each year, 15 seconds at a time.
These 50 million `moments of truth' are the moments that ulti- mately determine whether SAS will succeed or fail as a company.
They are the moments when we must prove to our customers that SAS is the best alternative. (Carlzon, 1987: p. 3)
Thus, as Carlzon describes, he had to ensure that he and his managers created a system in which all employees who dealt with potential or actual customers were able to provide the best possible
`moments of truth'. As Carlzon maintained to his managers, staff in the front line were the ambassadors of SAS and if they felt the organisation did not value them, they would hardly feel inclined to put all their effort into pleasing the customer. Therefore, he rea- soned these people had to have confidence in themselves. This involved SAS in addressing not just the immediate issue of training and procedures, but also the conditions in which their employees worked. Notably, one of the things that SAS did was to provide uniforms that were designed to the highest quality by Calvin Klein.
As a consequence, SAS employees were enabled,empowered(a word that has great significance in improvement initiatives such as TQM) to use their own initiative on matters that were previously only capable of resolution by their superiors; something which inevitably took time and caused annoyance to customers.
According to Bank, what occurred at SAS was similar to the experience of Rank Xerox (Bank, 1992: p. 116). In particular, he describes how SAS was transformed from an organisation which had a `technical production orientated attitude' to one in which there was an `almost evangelistic dedication to putting customer service above all else' (Bank, 1992: p. 19). This transformation, he explains, occurred because employees in both Rank Xerox and SAS were encouraged to operate in a very different way to that which occurred previously. Additionally, Bank argues, there was an obsession in the desire by every person in these organisations to continuously think about howtheir approach to customers could be improved. What Bank is alluding to is something that is more commonly referred to as the culture of an organisation.18 As the next chapter describes, a vital part of benchmarking and improve- ment is the need to consider the culture of an organisation. How- ever, as will be explained, dealing with culture is something that requires great skill, understanding and, usually, considerable time and effort.
Summary
In this chapter, the following aspects of TQM have been described:
. What TQM is, and why it is important to benchmarking . Its historical development in Japan from the philosophy of
SPC (Deming) and Juran's quality trilogy
. HowToyota learned to understand the value of process management and employee contribution to improvement . The use of TQM in the West, and howit is possible to learn
(benchmark) howexcellent organisations have achieved superior levels of customer satisfaction