Total Quality Management 1

Case study questions and answers

Total Quality Management: Three Case Studies from Around the World

Khulood Khalil Madi

Al Ain University
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Total Quality Management: Three Case Studies from Around the World

In this assignment, I’m required to answer some certain questions about a case study that

contain three sub cases about three different organizations “ Atlantic care, Santa Cruz Guitar Co

and Ramaiah Institute of Management Studies). The questions are:

1. Going over the case study, give a one paragraph summary of the management dilemma each

case presented.

I will start by stating my opinion of the management dilemma concerning AtlantiCare. Even

though AtlantiCare is well known for its health services and considered as a role model in the

health industry but the company experienced tough obstacles which they have successfully

passed throw. The dilemma was that there gaps in staff communication which means longer

patient waiting time in the emergency department before they are transferred into the hospital

rooms

The second company is Santa Cruz Guitar Co; this company does handicraft guitars with

high quality. The dilemma was that the company had problems when they use to produce less

than 800 instruments in a year since they don’t have a formal quality department, and they didn’t

know how to segregate the work and how to apply TQM principles so they may exceed customer

expectations.

The third case study is about RIMS “Ramaiah Institute of Management Studies”. It’s one of

the best universities in the world with high opportunity of being employed as soon as graduated.

Before they reached to this position they found out that less than 25% of their students are

employed and ready for the work environment, and that made them question their level of

education
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2. Explain the role of PDCA in improving the quality (pick one case).

From my study of the first handout in the course material, I will talk about the definition of

the cycle and how it was applied. PDCA which is Deming cycle “plan, do, check, act”, he

proposed this so the business activities will be monitored and have continual feedback in order to

improve. According to Deming the definition of each component is as follow:

Plan: The analysis for the business activities and components of the process.

Do: This is implementing the plan.

Check: Assess the improvement and report the results.

Act: To decide what is needed to be changed to get better results. And then redo the cycle.

I will choose AtlantiCare Company since they clearly mentioned that they used PDCA for

the improvement of quality. Before talking about the process of PDCA, I would like to say that

the company didn’t take profit into consideration when implementing the improvements and that

proves what I was learning in the course; that quality go hand in hand with long term profit since

their earnings and number of patients tripled.

First of all, the management decided that they want to increase the satisfaction of the

customers “patients” so they wanted to do some improvements across the board, then they

adapted the PDCA, in the first phase which is the planning “analysis” revealed serious issues

concerning the communication among the staff which had a lot of consequences such as

complaints and longer waiting time for the patients. After that they decided to do something

about it, so instead of the normal flow of the communication “top-down”; they decided to give

the freedom to every employee to give feedback at each and every level. In order to insure that

this change is implemented correctly; they gave training to the employees to introduce them to
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this new culture and it’s explained on the orientation for the new employees. Now all employees

understand the five key areas of the process “quality, customer service, people, growth and

performance” which ultimately lead to integration and harmonization.

3. What measurements were taken to improve quality in each organization (in each case)?

The first case study is about AtlantiCare, this case showed the importance and the role of

Quality management and TQM in the health sector, they have a great impact on the service,

quality mangers seeks the customer satisfaction and better treatment, without them the company

can’t have long term success and customer satisfaction, in fact it was the reason that the

company is a role model in the sector. AtlantiCare choose to adapt PDCA which revealed some

issues “complaints and longer waiting time”. In order to turn things around they decided to

change the flow “instead of top-bottom, now any employee can participate with feedback”, so

basically they changed the culture. In order for them to maintain good results, the changes should

be understood and implemented by the employees and that is exactly what they did; they gave

the employees crash courses and orientation, they also changed the management style into tight-

lose-tight style management. After doing all the changes, it lead to the improvement in many

things such as “better engagement, enhancing clinical communication and service opportunities”

AtlantiCare rise and their earnings and number of patient tripled after these changes.

The second case concerns Santa Cruz Guitar Co; this company does handicraft guitars with

high quality. I would like to shade light on the quality management role in this type of activity,

being a quality manager on such company gives many advantages such as “motivate the

employees to be proactive quality commitment, get to integration, segregation of duties in an

efficient way and find out how to improve the skills of the workers”. This company use to work
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on a low scale production but then the demand kept increasing so some changes had to be made.

The owner Dan Robert decided to change things in order to keep his quality level and he created

a new work environment, so he divided the work into six workstations were the process of

making the instruments happens and each workstation has a senior craftsman, in addition, no

instrument leaves the shop until he is 100% pleased with its quality. In addition, Mr. Dan is

involves in every level of production.

The third case study concerns a university, as usual; I will start by statin the role of quality

management in education. First, quality management has no certain framework but there are

certain instruction that could lead you throws the way. Quality management in education

concentrates on bringing out a new generation that has a well foundation and scientifically strong

and that is done by strong faculty members that are updated to the new methods of teaching and

so on. RIMS “Ramaiah Institute of Management Studies”, it’s one of the best universities in the

world with high opportunity of being employed as soon as graduated. Before they reached to this

position they found out that less than 25% of their students are employed and ready for the work

environment, and that made them question their level of education. So they decided to reassess

their quality management, that when they hired Dr Krishnamurthy; the leader of the team that

would analyze and implement changes to improve quality. The team first was given training

courses in quality analysis skills and improvements tools like PDCA is order to be able to

analyze the three dimensions: assurance of learning, productivity and quality of placements. The

team was asked to identify the key stakeholders and the processes, from there, they used

fishbone diagram to identify the roots of the issues. After the analysis, they found that students’

knowledge was rated at 36% which is much more less than other universities. So changed had to

be done, Dr Krishnamurthy came up with a strategy it improve the school curriculum, but it’s a
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team effort, every individual in the university had to help, of course some of them had some

resistance but changes happened such as adding case studies to the curriculum, getting

certification from the British council. All these changed lead to promising results, and these

university students became easily employable because of the improvements in their education.

4. As a manager, give a brief example of how you would improve quality (for each case).

Support your response from material you learned in class

Since I’m taking quality management course; I have some ideas about improving the quality

for the previous case studies.

AtlantiCare: the problem was that the patients had complaints which had sequences. They

dealt with the problem beautifully, and if I was the manger I would probably do the same “going

with PDCA”, but there is another solution in mind. In the first handout, I learned about the key

elements of total quality, so if I was in charge, I would employ a team that could check these

elements and see what’s messing and what is required to make them there. As well as, in quality

management, if there is a failure then it’s the management fault and the management should be

questioned. In addition, I would identify the new applications to enhance the patients access to

his information, or to keep waiting for the next new invention in health care” new health

instruments” and be the first one to get them, to have an effective internal and communication

system among staff and departments so information would be transferred at the same time so

they could be used affectively and to create a flexible strategy that deals with the variation of the

market.

Santa Cruz Guitar Co: this case was talking about how the demand increased and how the

owner had to deal with the increase in the production. If I was the owner of this business, I
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would most probably use CNC machines in my production, it may be expensive at first but it can

deal with big amounts of instruments with high accuracy so quality would be assured, and of

course, I would create a new culture and way of work since now machines are involved so the

employees must be aware of the changes so they can know what their new role will be. As well

as, I wouldn’t stop here, I will try to go global and increase the advertising to get more demand.

In addition, I think this is a very important point which is the supply chain, I would try my best

to have a good relationship with the suppliers and to be environment friendly since most of the

instruments are made of wood especially high quality wood like mahogany wood so I will try my

best to not harm the environment or at least get the wood from previous material for example if a

man wants to sell his boat that is made of mahogany wood, that how I don’t increase the trees

that are being cutting and it’s a kind of recycling. I would also give the employees training to

increase their skills and to keep improving them. The last thing in my mind is to change the

leadership style by being a transactional leader, to motivate the employees to be proactive so

they don’t need someone to check their work.

RIMS “Ramaiah Institute of Management Studies”: if I was the principle of this university,

I would do some checklists to see what quality measures messing, surveys to students to see

what wrong, and I would do roots changes such as gifting new faculty that are the best” hire the

best”, changing people intensives “ try to become transactional leader” , to be involved and stay

away from the traditional management that has to do with top-bottom flow, getting accreditation

and quality certificates, it’s very important for the whole staff to know how the university work

“trying to reach to integration” and to involve the students in the process of the changing “taking

their opinion”.