L. Drew Rosen, Ph.D., JONAH
Professor
The University of North Carolina at Wilmington
What is Quality?

The quality of service is defined by the
customer’s “perception” of both the
quality of the product and the service
providing it.
What is Total Quality Management?

Total
 Made up of the whole

Quality
 Degree of excellence a product or service
provides

Management
 Act, art, or manner of handling, controlling,
directing, etc.
What is Quality?

You only need to ask 4 questions to
determine if quality customer service is
being provided:





What is your service, product, or process?
Who are your customers?
What do they expect?
Are you delivering to those expectations?
Total Quality is meeting the customer’s
expectations by doing the right thing right
the first time.
Data

“In God we trust, others must have
data.”
 Decisions are based on fact and data, not
management’s hunch or intuition.
 Identify specific problems and isolate the
magnitude of waste.
 Target solutions on “root” causes.
 Measure progress/improvement with
Statistical Process Control (SPC).
Data

“Quality must be transformed from
meaning ‘more and better of everything’
to ‘searching relentlessly for means of
improvement that reduce costs while
maintaining or enhancing quality’…”
 Enhancing Quality in an Era of Resource
Restraints, The University of Michigan
Process Concepts
94% of the problems are in the process;
6% are with the workers.
 Workers are responsible for doing the
work within the system; Managers are
responsible for improving the system.
 Workers know where to find the
problems and the solutions.
 Teams of employees can improve
processes to solve problems.

 W. Edwards Deming
Employee Involvement
All employees, no matter what they do
or where they work, have ideas about
how to do their work more productively.
 Employees represent a source of
knowledge and creativity which we often
fail to utilize.
 The people closest to the problems
often have the best ideas on how to
make improvements.

Employee Involvement
Most employees are willing, even eager,
to share their ideas.
 People involved in making the decisions
are more committed to implementing
those decisions.
 Management does not have all the
answers.

 Adapted from Xerox Corporation
Customer

Whoever receives your services
Total Quality Defined

“A structured system for creating
organization-wide participation in the
planning and implementation of a
continuous improvement process that
exceeds the needs of the
customer/client.”
Key Elements of Total Quality




Culture Change
Top level
management
commitment and
involvement
Continuous
incremental
improvement
Focus on processes




Employee
involvement
Customer driven
Structured analysis
Decisions base on
fact and data
Old Beliefs That Get In The Way
The purpose of business is to make a
profit
 Quality costs too much
 Employees are costs
 You work for you boss
CUSTOMER

CEO
YOU
YOU
CEO
CUSTOMER
If 99.9% Is Good Enough, Then…





12 newborns will be given to the wrong
parents daily.
114,500 mismatched pairs of shoes will be
shipped per year.
18,322 pieces of mail will be mishandled
per hour.
2,000,000 documents will be lost by the
IRS this year.
2.5 million books will be shipped with the
wrong cover.
If 99.9% Is Good Enough, Then…
2 planes landing at Chicago’s O’Hare
airport will be unsafe every day.
 315 entries in Webster’s dictionary will
be misspelled.
 20,000 incorrect drug prescriptions will
be written this year.
 880,000 credit cards in circulation will
turn out to have incorrect cardholder
information on their magnetic strips.

If 99.9% Is Good Enough, Then…
103,260 income tax returns will be
processed incorrectly during the year.
 5.5 million cases of soft drinks produced
will be flat.
 291 pacemaker operations will be
preformed incorrectly.
 3,056 copies of tomorrow’s Wall Street
Journal will be missing one of three
sections.
