Tools of quality and benchmarking

In order to achieve what they do, Amazon offers a number of e-mail addresses to ensure customers can request for information that bothers them, and also to encourage suggestions and feedbacks. In addition to this, Amazon provides customers with telephone services, therefore, users or customers can access the customer service representatives through the telephone 24 hours a day, and 7 days a week. Moreover, to ensure the quality of services provided by the customer service is prompt and professional enough to meet customer demands, Amazon has automated some specific tools utilized by its customer support staff and also constantly planning for future enhancements.

Benchmarking is a systematic process that identifies how much a company like Sports Direct quest for perfection. An analysis is shown below:. To analyze the difficulty they fell into, they had to benchmark three key competitions in the same retail industry in the United Kingdom, and these include JD sports , MandMDirect , and Decathlon. They were able to achieve each of their benchmarking process using various systematic tools such as Visibility Index, Google Trends, Keyword Volumes, Index Pages, and Takeaways.

Jarvis, Therefore, benchmarking for this organization is possible. In all their strategies to improve customer services, they have not considered benchmarking their customer services.

Studies have shown that Sports Direct continuously works to improve their customer support and services at all levels within the group, but there is a need for more emphasis on benchmarking this process.

Discovering the position in the best performance being achieved is important for every organization. This is in fact a factor that impacts the use of benchmarking. According to Zailani et al. Other factors include the need to share the establishment and proven best practices by an organization as well as identifying and analyzing world-class performance.

In addition, utilizing tested and proven practices, convincing skeptics of those that have seen benchmarking processes working, and overcoming related inertia and complacency as well as developing a sense of urgency are what are revealed as factors that accelerates change and restructuring in the use of benchmarking.

And since the owners of all the processes in an organization are involved, implementation or the use of benchmarking is possible. Kelessidis, When using benchmarking to analyze the performance of an organization, it has been established that benchmarking has its own virtues. The limitations that could be experienced by an organization are the comparison of the production time or the cost of a particular process to that of the competitor companies.

When they consider the time or process required for their level of efficiency, they may find it difficult to carry out the process of benchmarking. Additionally, when benchmarking, it is important not to ignore the differentiated output that the shared services or internal support group provide, otherwise, the numeric comparisons or straight-across cost spelt out will be meaningless. Therefore, when benchmarking, companies should take into consideration more of commoditized processes or services.

Kaplan, Successful organizations have been able to figure out the secret behind their success owing to customer satisfaction. It is important that an environment which supports a quality culture is created and it requires a systematic and structural process. Amongst the principles of TQM, focusing on customer is a major principle that guarantees quality improvement. It is only customers that determine the level of quality an organization attains.

Additionally, since customer service is within management control, there is more emphasis on the role of customers or clients in TQM.

This emphasis, according to Charintimath , requires the use of TQM tools to measure and effectively put a solution to customer satisfaction within the management to avert the organization from losing its customers or clients. Al-Ibrahim, Fundamentally, the premise of TQM theories is based on the fact that if the needs and wants of customers are kept in focus, controlling customer satisfaction is attainable.

Al-Ibrahim, Furthermore, achieving the analysis of TQM philosophy for organizational change, it is necessary to consider the fact that Edward Deming discovered his 14 Points of Quality Management. These ideas have been modified over the years and it was done for the sake of improving the quality of service for customers for their satisfaction. According to Anderson et al. The company recognized that in order to win a larger market share and establish itself in the market, it has to increase the number of features in its product while keeping the price at the same level or even decreasing it.

The team identified that the activities adding the most to the cost are marketing and purchasing parts in an open market. The next step was to assign the proper metrics to marketing and purchasing activities and gather the required data. The company joined the benchmarking network and in a few weeks gathered enough data to compare the performance of its processes.

The results indicated that the marketing activities could be improved significantly. The team recognized that many businesses in the industry were able to attract new customers profitably through heavy advertising online.

The next activity analyzed was the purchase of parts in the open market. The team identified that this activity could be improved by manufacturing the parts inside the company or by establishing long term relationships with suppliers. The collected data and the experience of other similar businesses showed that the best option would be to establish long term relationships with suppliers. It would cost less than manufacturing the parts inside the company or buying them in an open market.

It would also allow ordering customized parts that were needed for the new features. Save my name and email in this browser for the next time I comment. Definition Benchmarking is a strategy tool used to compare the performance of the business processes and products with the best performances of other companies inside and outside the industry.

Named after Walter A. Shewhart, this quality improvement tool can help quality assurance professionals determine whether or not a process is stable and predictable, making it easy for you to identify factors that might lead to variations or defects.

Control charts use a central line to depict an average or mean, as well as an upper and lower line to depict upper and lower control limits based on historical data. By comparing historical data to data collected from your current process, you can determine whether your current process is controlled or affected by specific variations. Using a control chart can save your organization time and money by predicting process performance, particularly in terms of what your customer or organization expects in your final product.

Some sources will swap out stratification to instead include flowcharts as one of the seven basic QC tools. Flowcharts are most commonly used to document organizational structures and process flows, making them ideal for identifying bottlenecks and unnecessary steps within your process or system.

Mapping out your current process can help you to more effectively pinpoint which activities are completed when and by whom, how processes flow from one department or task to another, and which steps can be eliminated to streamline your process.

See other ways that you can use Lucidchart to elevate your business processes. What does HR actually do? Lucidchart is the intelligent diagramming application that empowers teams to clarify complexity, align their insights, and build the future—faster. With this intuitive, cloud-based solution, everyone can work visually and collaborate in real time while building flowcharts, mockups, UML diagrams, and more.

The most popular online Visio alternative , Lucidchart is utilized in over countries by millions of users, from sales managers mapping out target organizations to IT directors visualizing their network infrastructure. Stratification Histogram Check sheet tally sheet Cause and effect diagram fishbone or Ishikawa diagram Pareto chart rule Scatter diagram Shewhart chart Control chart. Where did the quality tools originate? Stratification Stratification analysis is a quality assurance tool used to sort data, objects, and people into separate and distinct groups.

Histogram Quality professionals are often tasked with analyzing and interpreting the behavior of different groups of data in an effort to manage quality. Check sheet or tally sheet Check sheets can be used to collect quantitative or qualitative data. Cause-and-effect diagram also known as a fishbone or Ishikawa diagram Introduced by Kaoru Ishikawa, the fishbone diagram helps users identify the various factors or causes leading to an effect, usually depicted as a problem to be solved.