Should General Electric Appliances Customer Relations use Total Research Paper

Should General Electric Appliances Customer Relations use Total Quality Management Instead of Six Sigma Management - Research Paper Example This definition implies that TQM focuses on continuous improvement by involving people at all levels and looks at all processes at organizational level. It does not focus on just one part of the organization but the entire organization as a whole. It involves integrating the technical systems of an organization with the social systems (Barnes and Pike, 1996). The idea is to achieve total customer, employee and stake holder satisfaction. It follows various principals for leading an organization to ensure continuous improvement. These include Involving employees at all level - This is because a TQM effort cannot be successful if it is propagated from the leadership team without the employees at executive level understanding its implications and working towards executing it. Focus on customer satisfaction Ownership at the lowest levels – Employees at the lowest levels need to take ownership of the TQM initiatives and work as self managed teams (Charantimath, 2003). Team work â₠¬â€œ Success of TQM initiative depends on how well the various teams can coordinate and collaborate with each other as well as within themselves. Competitive benchmarking helps in continuous improvement. Thus, it is vital for a company to measure itself against the best performers of the industry in which it is operating. Company culture is an important element of TQM. Hence, the culture should be developed to instill the quality way of working in all employees (Murray, n. d). TQM uses various tools and models to achieve continuous improvement. Some of the quality improvement tools it uses are – check-sheets, histograms, Pareto charts, Control charts, scatter diagrams, process capability studies and so on (Charantimath, 2003). All these tools help the managers to find opportunities for improvement. Some of these tools are also used to monitor the performance of the process on a continuous basis so that any deviations from expected levels are detected and sorted at the earlies t. Such monitoring also helps managers to analyze the performance and find ways of improvement. Six Sigma Six Sigma approach came far later than the TQM concept. In fact, Six Sigma is an outcome of TQM but its focus area is slightly different. It focuses mainly of defect reduction by reducing variation within a process (Shiba and Walden, 2001). Any reduction in variation of a production or service related process leads to standardized output which means reduction in errors or defects. It provides project focus for people to work on. For this, it uses the DMAIC (Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control) approach to work on a task in a structured way. These are the various stages of a project and help the project leader and other stake holders focus on all aspects of a process which are relevant at the particular stage of a project. Six Sigma provides explicit tools for every stage of the project. Some of the tools are – histograms, fishbone diagrams, paretos, run charts, process control charts and so on. All these tools help the project team in analysis of the data at various stages of the project. Six Sigma verses TQM Just like TQM Six Sigma uses various tools to analyze process performance. It also requires top leadership support for successful implementation just like TQM. A cultural change is required to be brought about within the organization for both the approaches to work. Many of the tools used by