Total Quality Management Cases

Case 1 - Santa Cruz Guitar Company

SCGC reflects Deming's 1st point: Create a Vision and Demonstrate them is the luthiers are encouraged to enhance their skills and try to find better ways to operate. These allows the craftsmen to explore new techniques in guitar building to become more efficient.

Deming's 4th point: Stop making decisions purely on the basis of cost. SCGC uses the highest grades of tonewoods and they only the hand pressure to form the wood rather than using the machines. SCGC prefer to heat and bend the wood by hand rather that machine because the tension in the wood has been relaxed, and the wood eventually takes the shape of the template. When it is shaped by machines it will have a tendency to spring back when they are being forced into molds.

Deming's 5th point: Improve constantly and forever.  SCGC allows self-improvement through training and encouraging workers to start their own business that the company can also benefit.

Deming's 12th point: Remove Barriers to Pride in Workmanship and Deming's 13th point: Encourage Education and Self-improvement. SCGC encouraged workers to further enhance their skills either by taking external courses and allowing employees to build 2 instruments per year which creates pride to SCGC because the workers will care about something, they are making for themselves.

Case 2 - Walker Auto Sales and Service

Issues that Darren Walker must consider under the quality of service businesses are:

1. Customer needs and performance standards are often difficult to identify and measure in service, because each customer has different wants in a service.
2. The output of many service system is intangible; service quality can be assessed thru customers’ expectations and past experiences.
3. Customers often are involved in the service process and present while it is being performed. Customers expectation about the service providers is very high so employees must give the service favorable to what customers expect.
4. Services are generally labor intensive. WASS has an increasing competition for skilled employee, changing customer preferences causes growing demand and results to more competition.
5. Many service organizations must handle large numbers of customer transactions. Demanding for a large number of customers can increase opportunity for errors.

List of Action Plans …

1. Develop customer relationship management
2. Plan on exercising leadership and strategic planning
3. Hire and train employees to support customer relationship
4. I mprove systems through information and knowledge management

Case 3 - The Quarterly Sales Report

        Even though Hagler was happy about the positive result of some regions still there are regions who can he call as “problematic” region because of the negative sales. Hagler as a leader he’s being so straightforward to his employees praising those who did their best and giving more attention to those who did not perform well.