zeldabelle

How to Enhance Quality in Your Business

Every business must strive to provide quality products and services to customers. To achieve that objective the company must draw well thought out policies and procedures to ensure 100% achievement of the targets.

Here are some tips to ensure that your business attains and enhance quality:

Document Quality Objectives and Procedures

Quality management objectives, policies and guidelines must be set and published in manuals, in the business newsletter, on the notice board and wherever appropriate. This is to educate and remind employees and management and serve as guidelines. Even suppliers and customers should be informed on the company's quality management policies and where appropriate be advised to adhere to them.

Educate Employees on Quality Requirements

For total quality management to work everyone in the business must be educated and trained in its principles. Everyone must be brought on board – from the cleaner, the gardener, the electrician, the clerk, and manager etc. Employees should be made to own the process and not to feel left out of the action. Employees should be organised in quality circles (groups) within departments to brainstorm and implement quality issues.

Foster a Policy of Zero Tolerance to Defects

One error could cause a thousand corresponding errors or negative consequences. Let's take a typical example of a car. A loose nut on the tyre can cause the tyre to run inappropriately and cause an accident. The accident may affect you and whoever you are carrying in the vehicle and probably passers by and other vehicles. It may lead to deaths and injury. The multiplier effect may affect your life and other people's lives without your knowledge just from a single defect. This is therefore to show every aspect of your business must be taken seriously.

All products and services must be checked for compliance to specifications and procedures. The business must foster a policy of zero tolerance to defects and all efforts should be made towards that end.

Use TQM Tools and Statistical Techniques to Measure Quality

Total Quality Management Tools (TQM) tools are a necessary component if you want to measure and enhance quality. Tools such as checklists, flowcharts, Gantt charts, Ishikawa diagrams and the like are important in the quality management process. Statistical techniques help to measure quality levels. By applying such techniques you would have set your business on the quality path. Ensure that you have minimum and quality levels for your products and services. You can use industry, national or international quality standards. If your business attains such standards, inform your customers by publishing your attainment or displaying the quality mark appropriately.

BRAINSTORM PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS

A good approach to solving problems and technical challenges is to form quality circles, which will brainstorm problems and solutions and forward to management for approval. Root problems should be brainstormed, key solutions to them proposed and forwarded to management for approval.

REDUCE WASTAGE

Research has shown that most businesses have a 20% wastage rate. Check your dustbin. What do you see? What about the stores? How many goods have been returned because of defects in the past three months? You should work to attain zero defect in your products or services. Ensure that goods are made to specifications. Use statistical techniques to measure quality. Reduce paperwork. Improve the design and substance of your goods and services. Tighten controls. Reduce pilferage.

DELIGHT THE CUSTOMER

Quality management is not static but is a continuous process with the aim of ever delighting the customer. Remember that your competitors are working overtime to get your customers and stay on top. You should work ever harder to get their customers and delight your customers often. You can do that by anticipating customers' needs. Do surveys and research on customers' needs and expectations. Check what competitors are offering. Take action to continuously improve your goods and services.

LEARN FROM THE GURUS

Total quality management embodies a set of rules, policies and guidelines which are best learned from the pioneers. Get yourself books and manual quality management especially from the gurus such as Deming, Juran Crosby, Ishikawa, Fergenbaum and the like to learn more. Most of their ideas may be about manufacturing or not directly relevant to your business but they could be adapted to your business needs and requirements.

BE ACTION ORIENTED

A problem plaguing many people and businesses is their failure to take positive action and be mired by rhetoric and apathy. Management is tied down in endless meetings, conferences ad seminars whose recommendations are never implemented.

Prepare an action plan of your recommendations and solutions with set time frames and review periods. Check what makes action impossible to implement or bottlenecks to implementation.

Your action plan should be divided into short term, medium term and long-term activities. It should be backed by a budget for financing it.

Quality management or TQM is a broad subject and you require to learn more than what is provided briefly here. TQM is not the panacea for all business problems but they can be reduced by 50% if you adopt it appropriately.

To succeed in business you need the right business plan backed by adequate capital, the right product or service, the right marketing strategy, the right location and the right implementation strategy.

Quality management if well implemented could set your business on the path to profitability and success.

About The Author

Abdallah Khamis Abdallah is a freelance copywriter. He provides quality marketing solutions that can boost your business sales and website traffic. Participate in contests to win prizes and get free gifts. For details visit his website at: http://www.qualitywritingsolutions.com

quantumpro@lycos.com

MORE ARTICLES:

Netwell Noise Control Wins Small Business Standard of Excellence Web Award for 'Outstanding Achievement in Website Development' at Web Marketing Ass
Netwell Noise Control is pleased to announce that the Web Marketing Association has presented the Small Business Standard of Excellence Web Award for "Outstanding Achievement in Website Development" to Netwell Noise Control for it's website www.esoundproof.com

Running Your Online Business Can Be Easy
You can run your own business in many ways. The easiest way by far to make money from home, is to start an online business. The reason that running your business online can be so easy is that you are basically running a business that the whole world has access to.You will soon see that you have an worldwide audience.

You Quit Your Job and Started Up Your Own Business. Now, How Do You Make it Work?
Ok, so you???ve quit your job and started up your own business.

Best Home Based Internet Business Opportunity - Apply Two Simple Steps of Money Spinning for Earning Killer Money.
Information Technology plays tremendous role to develop the country. Recent trend of market shows that country economy is booming with the help of Information Technology and Internet world. Now online business is the main market of country where major business transactions are held.

Handmade Beauty Business . . . Virtually!
The business of Handmade Beauty has grown exponentially in the past ten years. I have personally observed and been an integral part of enormous growth and innovation as the industry has become more well- known, and even mainstream.

Global Survey: Business Intelligence Professionals Prefer Corporate-Wide Implementation; Steep Price Tags Stall Universal Adoption
Nearly 60 percent of respondents agree that knowledge workers throughout organizations should have access to Business Intelligence capabilities.

Is Starting A Business For Me? What To Consider Before Starting A Business
Do you have the right temperament?Starting a small business is one of the most serious decisions that a person can take in life. Positively, it often results in higher income levels than one could achieve as an employee together with the unique buzz of being your own boss but conversely it also can be stressful, will demand longer working hours and will probably reduce your ability to take long holidays.

Budgeting Your Money When You Own A Business
One of the most difficult things to do when you start a new business is putting together a budget. Without any financial history on which to base income and expenses, it may seem like guesswork, but as part of any business plan a tentative budget can be established with some thought and anticipation for the future.

Why Franchise Your Existing Business?
Let's say that you own your own pizza business. You have been working very hard for many years to establish your business. Your efforts have paid off. You are very successful. Except for the long hours that you have worked, your wife and kids are very happy. It is a good life. Yet something is still missing. You still have that burning desire to grow and expand your store by adding additional locations. And more income would always be nice! But you know how many hours you already spend working in the store. You just don't know where you could find the time to devote to additional locations. You know that absentee ownership does not work very well. To be successful one has to be there watching the store working many hours. And you can't be i...

Discovering The Best Home Business Opportunity
Finding the best home business opportunity can be quite the trick. There are tons of them out there these days, just vying for your attention, but it may take a bit of searching before you find one that is really going to pay off in the end. There are a couple of things to think about when you are looking to start with one of these home business opportunities.

Next Generation Real Estate and Financial Services Business Model
Independent real estate professionals everywhere are feeling the squeeze by large companies who are consolidating services. This includes State chartered banks in 27 states that are not prevented from establishing real estate companies within their structure.

Spyware Or Software: Your Business Guide To Must-have Software For 2007
If you use a computer, and run a business, then no doubt you have gone through, and may still be going through, the confusing time of deciding which technologies are actually important to your business.

Unfinished Business (Part 1)
Most of life can be said to be bad, or problematic, or painful, or sorrowful. Every great religion acknowledges this fact regarding life.

10 Cardinal Rules for Business Growth
After over 30 years of participating in hundreds of businesses, competing in at least as many different industries, with companies marketing both products and services, you begin to develop and accumulate some fundamental businesses axioms or "rules of thumb" that seem to make more sense everyday and gain more value in business practice as your career continues to advance and evolve.You like to think what you have learned and the business knowledge you have retained along your long and varied career path is unique, proprietary, or even "original", but somewhere deep inside you know that most of the things you hold near and dear to your own business self identity probably were already developed, practiced, and taught way before you ever ente...