Total Quality Management and Lean Production in Organizational Change
Introduction
In today’s context, change in an organizational framework is a progressive process. It is no longer a sudden exception to improve an organization existing efficiency. Change in organizational management is a procedure that adjust to personal benefits of employees with business goals, strategies, and culture. Changing tool will be effective within an organization provided the correct technique tools are being use effectively. This essay systematically categories appropriateness of TQM, and lean production in increasing effectiveness of an organization’s business policies to achieve desired goals. Lean production help in a manufacturing industry such as Mitsubishi Motors Singapore to bring efficiency in its productivity. On the other hand, Total Quality Management help in a service industry such as Ritz Carlton Singapore, being an international five-star hotel to bring in a change in functionalities of it through involving people and technical aspects under the same roof. Firstly, this essay will explain the theory and function of the both selected changing tools. Characteristic of both service and manufacturing industry will be discussed to analyse effectiveness of the changing tools. This essay will also cover the application of the two changing tools in both manufacturing and service industry. Lastly, evaluation of whether the two changing tools are appropriate to change both service and manufacturing industry will be provided.
Lean Production
The lean production is an approach to management that focuses on decreasing waste production within a manufacturing organization while ensuring the production quality. It is an operations management that driven by three targets which is zero defects, zero inventory and zero waste. To elaborate further, zero defects and zero waste require a continuous improvement system based on multi-skilled teams where else zero inventory depends on just in time supply chain management to avoid deadlock within the organization. Lean manufacturing includes mass production, just in time production, flexibility, mass product customization, agile and rapid production.
Lean production tools aim to cut cost by putting the business more efficient and responsive to market needs. Chiarini (2014, 226) notes that lean production tools ensure thequality, cost, resources and time are managed in most optimized way and not wasted. This manufacturing technique also considers that no wastes are generated due to excessmanufacturing orders or overburden and no wastes are created due to unequal and uneven distribution of workloads.
Total Quality Management (TQM)
Total Quality management is a management tools that ties different aspect of organizational functions such as ways of promoting the products, designing of the products, maintaining high-quality customer services and arrangement of financial resources. The approaches to high quality covers statistical quality control which measures the variation for consistency purposes. Team technique is required for quality improvement and standard endorse systems to guarantee the quality. TQM focus on cultural factors, communication, teamwork, and group problem-solving techniques. TQM target to improve skill sets of employees and their knowledge base to meet customer needs. All members of an organization following principles of TQM strives to improve services, product quality, processes and work culture to meet customer satisfaction in a longer term.
Characteristic of Service and Manufacturing Industry
Both service and manufacturing industry have different characteristic in nature. Ritz-Carlton Singapore being service based industry has certain distinguishing characteristic to enable them to run their business efficiently. These are intangibility, inseparability, heterogeneous behavior, lack of ownership, variation in products and perishability. Services are intangible form of hospitality and services cannot be rated before deliver. Therefore, it is important for Ritz Carlton Singapore to apply TQM theory to ensure customer satisfaction.
Mitsubishi Motors Singapore being a manufacturing industry, automotive products are first manufactured, stored and finally sold to target consumers. The main objective of manufacturing industries is to produce high-quality products, thus unnecessary defects in manufacturing process must be reduced to achieve maximum quality. However, it is challenging to maintain market compatibility, stay competitive, enhance business growth and design innovative production process in manufacturing industry without applying management changing tools. These goals will be achieved through an integrated formulation of lean production tool in their manufacturing procedure.
Application of Lean Production tool in Manufacturing Industry
Nicholas (2018, 22) state that lean production is applicable in manufacturing companies to reduce wastage of resources which includes raw materials, time and human resources. Pull system methodology ensures that different operational processes within a manufacturing unit such as customer and supplying process work in coordination with each other to meet consumer requirements. There are several types of wastes that includes over processing of raw products, overproduction of products that are not required, eliminating production of defective products and inventories.
Mitsubishi Motors Singapore applies lean production tool to decrease production time and inventories to meet market requirement. It is an approach to keep all works stations of Mitsubishi Motors to engaged effectively in producing a common product. Mitsubishi Motors Singapore follows a standardized quality work ethics and ensures a continuous flow of product from one manufacturing unit to another without delay in between the production process as explained in lean production theory.
Application of Lean Production tool in Service Industry
Ritz-Carlton hotel Singapore is a service industry and could improve customer satisfaction by removing waste and defects from product or services that offered to the consumer. Hotel managers require lean technique for managing individual value in an effective way because each customer defines the value in their own unique way so the experience between the customer will never be the same. Higor and Vieira (2015, 529) state the need of applying lean technique is require in a service segment. For instant, hotel industry to removes wasted resources from the process to make the service smoother by building its special flow of resources and cost weighing to achieve maximum customer satisfaction. All process from reservation inquiry until the arrival of the customer were crucial and important to Ritz Carlton Singapore to maintain the service quality. Number of staff that involve in the process can be reduce as certain steps can be undertaken by same staff to ensure smooth operation and reduce operational defects. By doing so, Ritz Carlton Singapore are more adaptive and flexible with bigger functionality of their employee.
Application of TQM in manufacturing Industry
Mitsubishi Motors globally applies Total Quality Management tools by adopting a development management system that examines products and ensure the quality throughout all processes. The process includes product planning to development, production, shipment, sales and after-sales service. From the technical aspect, Mitsubishi Motors conducts technical verification during each process to ensure the reliability of the recent technologies and check the possible operational defects. Mitsubishi Motors has shortened the vehicle development time by 10 months to improve the quality. It allows bigger focus on developing product and quality targets was set for each function to achieve at each stage of development. Mitsubishi Motors Singapore attend to customer feedback promptly by identifying the issue to ensure fast response. Feedback is important to Mitsubishi Motors and action will to taken accordingly to rectify the issue. For example, if the feedback was related to the technical issue, immediate action will be taken to examine the problem and product may recalls depending on the result finding. Mitsubishi Motors also focuses on improving skill sets of employees and their knowledge. The prime objective is to strengthen the company development capabilities. Training includes design review training sessions to improve skill levels for the staff was provided. The company also set a budget to consider engaging professional for training to achieve maximum improvement in the product quality.
Application of TQM in Service Industry
Total Quality Management has a vast implication in service industry as this changing tool aim at improving overall business context. It is important to hotel industry to apply total quality management effectively to meet customer satisfaction. Reason being the customer perception about a hotel may depend on individual experiences or branding of the selected hotel. Ritz-Carlton being a 5-star international hotel, customer would have expected certain standard or quality service from the hotel management. Hence, the hotel needs to take care the variability of services as different employees serve customers at different instants. Variability in services is a challenge to maintain service consistency. It is difficult to maintain the same level of service quality of their products in service-based industry. Thus, total quality management tool is more widely use in service-based industry to overcome this challenge.
Ritz Carlton hotel Singapore able to achieve business ethics and has interconnected various units of their service sectors to bring out completeness in their services via integrated system. Integration of service quality of this five-star international hotel with its core components achieved via their strategic management system. Ritz Carlton hotel Singapore ensure that their service quality improves on a continuous basis as it lead to innovate their existing products and service facilities to enhance the competitiveness in a market scenario of Singapore's service industries. The five-star hotel has also implemented fact and statistics decision making to achieve results based on practical test cases. (
Talib & Rahman (2015, 600) state Total Quality Management (TQM) has the advantage of integrating all essential aspects of managing an organization effectively under one roof. The major disadvantages of TQM are the demands change in existing culture and requires time-consuming planning measures and is also quite expensive to adapt. ConclusionIt can be concluded that lean Production tool is more effective in manufacturing industry. Reason being it helps to improve a configuration of the manufacturing system by streamline the processes which focuses on waste and cost reduction. Lean production creates a culture that sustain long-term commitment from top management through the entire workforce and improve the organisational performance. By using lean production theory, Mitsubishi Motors Singapore able to eliminates production of wastage of all kinds from a business organization through designing effective ways of fulfilling a work and production efficiency. Higher performance in operational or manufacturing system lead to zero defects and superior quality products was achieved to reach customer maximum satisfaction. On the other hand, Total Quality Management (TQM) helps better way in service industry than manufacturing industry. Quality management is a concept that integrate and bring together organizational goals and individual goals of employees under one roof. Every staff within the organization is responsible to achieve TQM. In today world, most of the customer do not accept mistakes as they require quality for money and putting service industry in pressure to improve their service quality control. Ritz Carlton Singapore adapt TQM change tools by focusing on overall development of an organization aligned with employee and customer interest. To maintained personal contact with the customer, Ritz Carlton Singapore ensure each of their staff personnel meet the work standard such as appearance, behavior, knowledge and skill to maintain the service quality.
Both changing tools has impact on service and manufacturing industry. However, company should evaluate in detail on which management change tools is suitable for them to achieve maximum efficiency.
