Unit 4: Quality Management
Quality management is a primary concern in operations departments. Though all employees and managers should be concerned with maintaining quality, most firms host a team dedicated to ensuring the quality of production. Quality management can come in any number of different forms. Quality control usually involves the random sampling of products coming off the line (with the goal of ensuring that all products are up to standards). This may be for compliance reasons (such as in meat production) or for quality service (such as checking the seams in the leather of a Rolls Royce car). Other quality managers are concerned with the quality of the production process itself: are all employees being productive? Is there a bottleneck in the production process? These focuses on efficiency are especially important for products with low margins. In this unit, you will learn about a few of the pioneers in total quality management as well as the processes used to control quality in manufacturing and service organizations.