Quality ranges from making organizations and their products or services perform up to the

standards of the stakeholders of an organization. This can be achieved by improving systems and
processes of a company and thereby making sure that the end product or the service meets
customer expectations. A quality product or a service indicates that the organization is fit and
effective in every form to achieve and deliver a quality product or a service. Quality does not
only mean that the company is manufacturing products with zero quality failures or delivering a
service on time. There is lot more meaning to quality. Finally the quality should satisfy all the
stakeholders of the company who have interests regarding the company and its products, not
only the customers who consume the products. The methods of improving quality of products
and services has been evolving since past but specifically in 21st century due to evolvement of
factories that do mass production (Baltescu, C.A., Boşcor, D., 2014, 65)

Heathrow Terminal 5 project has failed at different stages of the project and it has become only
visible when the airport started its operations. The T5 was supposed to be one of the leading
terminals in any airport in Europe but now it has a lot of stakeholders unsatisfied about the
project. Issues such as loss of luggage of the passengers and hundreds of flights being cancelled
have deteriorated the image of the London Heathrow Airport. Following is an analysis on how
quality frameworks such as Total Quality Management (TQM) and Six Sigma and others.

Koller (Koller, J., K 1995) defines TQM as representing a systematic way of managing an
organization's results. TQM involves new management strategies, changes in culture and
infrastructure, tools and techniques to determine all members of the organization to collaborate
and enable continuous improvement of quality defined by the client. TQM is a concept that
should have been incorporated by T5 project in both planning and implementation stages, mainly
in planning stage. A project like T5 involves a lot of operations where TQM is a must have tool
to ensure overall quality at the execution and after the day to day operations. TQM involves few
principles namely, customer focus, leadership, people involvement, process approach, systematic
approach to management and continual improvement. Customer focus is the 1 st principle in TQM
and T5 being a service, customer service becomes equally important as satisfying customer
needs. An airport is where a different set of people come and go every day in all 24 hours. Issues
such as loss of customer luggage has occurred as a result of project not being customer oriented.
The project should have planned how many customers will arrive per day and how many
luggages would be transferred and cleared and how many flights will arrive at the airport to be
customer focused. The project should have identified the importance of not having delays during
the customer clearance to be customer oriented. Leadership and people involvement are another
three principles of TQM. TQM should come from the top of the organization and should spread
across to the bottom of the organization. All T5 employees should involve in planning for quality
and implementing quality controls along with the leaders. The fourth principle is process
approach and this suggests that T5 should prepare processes for each activity and plan ahead on
where the quality issues could arise and also use the third principle, people involvement to plan
on how to reduce quality issues each of the processes. Here the systematic approach to
management comes in as the 5th principal and it suggests that there has to be a holistic view for
all the processes in T5 to achieve efficiencies. After all these, TQM is all about continuous
improvements. T5 cannot stop ensuring the quality if they follow TQM. Continuous quality
audits are required frequently to ensure all processes run smoothly.

References

Baltescu, Codruţa Adina, and Dana Boşcor. 2014. “The Assessment of Hotel Services in Poiana
Braşov Resort”. Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Braşov, Series V, Vol. 7(56), 17-22.

Koller, J. K. 1995. Total Quality Management in Service Industry, European Masters

Programme in Total Quality Management. Germany: University of Kaiserslautern.