Total quality management's effect on the manufacturing industry

Almost every manufacturing company is worried about their quality, no matter what department it is. The reason for this is that your overall quality can actually affect your relationship with your customers and in manufacturing your customers are everything. Basically in manufacturing if your customers are not happy with your quality they are not going to use your company which means you are going to suffer when it comes to sales and overall profits. But if your customers are happy with your quality then they are going to come back over and over again, not to mention refer you to other companies, which can in turn increase your sales and improve your overall profits. So as a manufacturing company you should seriously consider implementing a new total quality management program today.

Here are some things to think about when it comes to how total quality management can affect your manufacturing plant.

Number one:
Something that you need to think about when it comes to manufacturing is that employee turnover is actually very high, so one of the main goals of total quality management is to improve the work environment so that your employees will want to stay rather than leave.. Many entry level workers do not receive the training or feedback that they want to receive when they are trying to work their way up in the company. What usually happens is that manufacturing workers find that they have learned everything that there is to learn and won't be going anywhere else in the company so what they end up doing is moving on to a different company. This is not good for any company because turnover has a huge effect on the quality of the manufacturing system for many reasons. One of the main reasons is that there are costs associated with hiring and training new individuals. Another reason is that inexperienced workers are more likely to make mistakes which slow down the whole operation. So basically what you are going to have to do is to come up with some way to keep your employee around by increasing employee morale through total quality management.

Number two:
The total quality management also affects your manufacturing plant because it is designed to help improve your actual product. Part of the total quality management process begins by taking random sample selections of the product and testing those samples for the characteristics that are the most important to the customer. Something that you need to be aware of is that failures in the product should not only be isolated and removed, but they should also be used as a learning tools that your company can make better products. Some ways that you can use total quality management to improve your product is by evaluating the rules that dictate if a product is satisfactory or not, look closer at the products for failure, and using research and development to work more closely with the product testing team to see where concepts are not matching possibilities for performance. Basically what this is saying is that improving the product should be a company wide goal not just the responsibility of individual departments. So what you are going to need to do is to involve all the workers in the improvement of a product. This will result in more ideas that can be utilized but it will also allow all members of the manufacturing plant floor to feel that they have some kind of ownership in the product.

Number three:
Something else that you are going to need to think about when it comes to total quality management is that in order to improve your profits you are going to have to improve what you have your assembly line. And the best way to go about improving both your profits and your assembly line is to improve the wellbeing of those individuals in your organization. One of the best places to start looking at when you are preparing to make cut backs on costs and eliminate wastes is your quality assurance through the use of statistical methods. The reason for this is that it is very rare for improved profits to be found in an increased selling price. So what you are going to have to do is create a more desirable product while at the same time reducing employee turnover. In improving the quality of your manufacturing plant's work environment you will find a key factor to a financially rewarding business situation.

Rating: 3.2/5 (4 votes cast)

---

Categories: Total Quality Management,

Help others find this article:
Socializer, Digg, del.icio.us, reddit, StumbleUpon

Favorites: Add to favorites
Tags: manufacturing total_quality_management tips_about_total_quality_management what_you_need_to_know_about_total_quality_management total_quality_management's_effect_on_the_manufacturing_industry