Role of top Management:

The top management’s commitment is important as they are the ones in charge of improving
quality and allotting costs for the same. They are the ones that take the initiative to improve
the processes by means such as benchmarking, etc. By looking at the top management and how
committed they are to the quality improvement process will the employees also want to do
their part and be involved. Top management’s commitment is also important as they will
choose the organization which is following the best practices in the industry and try to observe
and see how exactly the other organization carries out the processes and how their own
processes can be improved to achieve improvement in quality.

It is not enough to simply clone the partner’s process as the quality improvement process
should be customer-centric and the requirements of the customers increase every day. By
cloning a particular process, there is no room for improvement. Rather the organization which
is benchmarking should set the best practices as goals and once they are achieved, they should
continuously work to improve the same processes for continuous quality improvement.

B) It is highly essential for a company to maintain close ties with upstream and downstream
supply chain partners as they can truly control the quality this way and the whole of the supply
chain needs to be involved to achieve Total Quality Management. The supply chain partners
should be made aware of what exactly the organization requires from them depending on the
customer requirements. Working closely with them will help tailor the products/ services to
customer needs and will result in customer satisfaction. Working and communicating effectively
will also help cut costs by improving processes as the feedback from one partner will flow to the
other and continuous incremental improvement is made over time. This will ultimately help to
reduce overall costs that would previously be used for rework, scrap, waste. These reduced
costs will then result in competitive prices for the customer, better sales and hence higher
market share for the organization. A collaborative effort from all the corners of a supply chain is
required to achieve this.

C) Price cannot be qualified as a dimension of quality, rather it is a characteristic that customers

will look at when buying a product. Quality differs from customer to customer and is quite
simply meeting the requirements of the customer through the product/ service provided. If the
needs of the customer have been met, quality has been achieved. Some customers may
consider price before buying a product but the main aspect is how the product will satisfy the
requirements of the customer.

D) The indicators are poor as they are characteristics of the process of producing a product/
service. Product quality is extremely customer-focused and it is only the customer which can
truly judge the quality of the product/ service based on whether or not it has met the needs of
the customer. These indicators are all back-end characteristics and the customer is not
concerned with what these statistics look like, rather the responsibility of these falls upon the
organization itself.