Total Quality Management Total Quality is a description of the culture, attitude and organization of a company that strives to provide customers with products and services with the purpose of satisfying their needs. Total Quality Management is an approach where processes are done right and defects are eradicated. It involves management and employees in the continuous improvement of the production of goods and services. Processes are improved by incorporation of knowledge and experiences of workers.
This is a process that is a combination of quality and management tools for increasing business transactions and reducing losses due to wasteful avoidable practices. In line with Raturi, Amitabh and Evans in 2005, it is a management philosophy that seeks to integrate all organizational functions such as marketing, finance, design, engineering, and production or customer service, to focus on meeting customer needs and organizational objectives.
Some of the Assessment standards used in Total Quality Management are reducing development cycle times, utilizing the ‘Just In Time’ or ‘Demand Flow’ production systems, reducing product and service costs, employee involvement or empowerment, fact based analysis, continuous improvement in all levels of production, challenging quantified goals and benchmarking and team work. Small batch – Big Batch Use of small batch sizes in production is a way of reducing steps in a process to have the best results under the highest amplitude conditions possible.
The method is meant to focus on quality by entailing the critical steps to bring out big results. Some steps such as gathering data and identifying the constraint may be omitted and focus done on quality assurance. Intuitively, control under high speed is hard. In production and operation management, the size of the process or project represents the speed of production and maintaining control with large batch sizes is hard. GAP Analysis – Pizza Chain (Pizza Express) Closing the gap has become one of the main priorities in various production companies and this includes closing the financial gap.
Majority of the pizza operators are pushing value-added programs, marketing to neighborhood niches and introducing a range of new products designed to increase sales and frequency. On the food front, the chains are tailoring new items to enhance their market appeals and improve perceived price-value relationships, with emphasis being quality. The current common trends in this industry are pizzas that shed traditional toppings like pepperoni and sausage which are filtered into the mainstream and the brands have introduced the barbecues on a regional basis.
Many pizza chains fight to be franchising companies for example McDonalds relies on its franchisees to play a major role in its success. It closes its gap to franchising and remains committed to this strategy as a predominant way of doing business. Majority of its worldwide restaurant businesses are owned and operated independently. They also offer franchises to poor performing restaurants in order to sustain profitability. They remain on a competitive age by differentiating their products from their competitors and utilizing the sponsorship programs for advertising and enhancing stronger public relations.
Diversification into other segments such as the fast food, take away market, breakfast, lunch and dinner market creates higher awareness. One strategy is to constantly introduce new products for a limited period of time to variety over and above a continuous supply of irresistible good products such as cheeseburgers. Too many products running at the same time deteriorates the speed of customer service. (Stevenson and Williams, 2005)
