3.3 Concept of quality

3.3 Concept of quality

1. Quality is as long as it meets a customers requirement. Businesses must set targets to achieve quality

2. Total quality management (TQM)

   • Every member of staff is focused on spotting and preventing errors and ensuring quality at each stage of the production. Stopping a problem before it happens
   • some staff cant be bothered to check quality constantly and dont want to tell co-workers to raise their working abilities

3. Measuring quality and identifying problems

   • Customers may be asked to complete surveys or complaints to check quality
   • Mystery visitors go to places like a shop or hotel and monitor how they are treated by staff and the quality they get the report it back to the management that hired them
   • Staff can be asked to check quality of work they have done at each stage

4. Consequence of bad quality

   • customer dissatisfaction, posting poor reviews so no new customers will come and the customer wont come back and cause a fall in profit
   • Cost of recalling faulty products, (swegway incident)
   • cost or replacing goods that were defective including bad reputation
   • Cost of waste, poor quality means products have to be thrown away, waste of material

5. Maintaining quality

   • Suppliers must be reliable who use good quality products
   • Staff must be trained to know quality standards.
   • Invest in quality equipment
   • Inspect product at each stage

6. Costs of improving quality

   • Inspection and checking quality control
   • Training staff to check own quality

7. Quality

   • benefits
     • Customers are loyal
     • Avoiding mistakes saves money
     • Can often charge for premium products
     • Can improve brand image and reputation
   • Costs
     • Inspection and checking quality control
     • Training staff to check their own quality

8. Things preventing achieving consistent quality

   • Finding reliable suppliers that can achieve business quality targets
   • If a business wants to grow it can be difficult to control quality as it involves so many people