Quality Management

Quality has grown to become a key competitive battleground for all organizations that supply products and/or services to customers making its management the most crucial responsibility of Operations Management. Quality is no longer the province of a specialist, but the duty of everyone as it permeates all aspects of an organization's operations, and developing and maintaining quality consciousness is one of the key roles that strategic operations managers have to play (Marwa & Zairi, 2008). Having recognized the strategic importance of quality, the absence of a consensus or a universally accepted definition has made it difficult for researchers, customers and managers to communicate effectively on the subject (Bryant & Roethlein, 2009). Quality is viewed differently by every expert on the subject (Tapiero, 1996) and its definition varies between academics and practitioners, between products and services, for different levels of dimensionality and for different industries.

Garvin (1988) has identified - Transcendent quality (condition of innate excellence), User-based quality (fulfillment of user's need and requirements), Value-based quality (performance or conformance at an acceptable price or cost), Product-based quality (an objectively measurable construct of service or product characteristics) and Manufacturing-based quality (conformance to design and specification requirements). The user-based and value-based qualities are defined externally to the producing organization, whilst product-based and manufacturing-based qualities are defined internally. These perspectives have to be reconciled as successful quality management can only be possible if operations capabilities are linked to the needs of the customers. Maylor (citied in Brown et al, 2001) has proposed a Bridge Model of Quality (Fig 1) for this purpose. The model emphasizes the necessity for operations to deal with both the intangible aspects of quality as well as the measureable and definable characteristics that can be controlled by operations in conjunction with marketing for customer requirements.

Figure 1- Bridge Model of Quality (Maylor, 2000)

The various definitions of quality might appear to be in conflict as academics and writers are expressing their views from practical experience in their individual fields of interest and in fact are defining a different piece of the whole. In reality the different definitions are related to and influence each other to contribute jointly to an organization's competitive position. According to Seawright & Young (1996), the different definitions of quality can be arranged along a continuum from the perspective of the customer of the service or product to the perspective of the producer or the provider. Organizations can use this continuum to help understand the relationships between the definitions and connect them to