Operations (Quality Management)

Abstract

A research project is a kind of a scientific endeavour to answer a research question. This research project is an institute assisted research project and will be in the quality side of operations domain and it is an exploratory research. This report aims to study the organization of quality and its policies in two main sectors of an economy – the manufacturing sector and the service sector. Three organizations have been chosen from both the sectors and a thorough study has been done to understand the working of their quality departments and how they work inter department wise in all. An attempt has also been made to try to generalise the organization chart according to the sectors, so that it can be used to get an overall idea of any company within that sector. The key to success in winning the global battle now and in future is to have high standards of service. Therefore, it is helpful for organizations to know about the customer service quality perceptions in order to overcome their competitors and attract and retain the customers. And also because of the globalization and liberalization of Indian economy, Indian manufacturing and service sector has been opened for multinational companies. The findings of the report show that the quality policies of a manufacturing organization are directed towards their product, i.e., having zero defects in their product, while that of the service organizations is focussed on customer satisfaction, as customers directly take the service and the employees are responsible for providing the same. They strive to give their service in the best way so that all the customer needs are taken care of, basically we are talking about customer service. More or less, if we look holistically, even for manufacturing organizations, products of good quality will lead to customer satisfaction only. Plus, in addition to this, many of the manufacturing companies also take into consideration the environmental impacts and try to make sure that there is no to minimal harm to the nature. While on the other hand, service organizations, depending on what kind of domain they are working in, they too have these additive quality principles incorporated in them. The Organization Quality chart also varies from company to company, and even if a generalised one can be created for a sector, but inside the sector it can differ greatly based on the type of company we are looking at, and the same applies for Quality Management Systems deployed by these organizations.