The dynamics of total quality management implementation: A computer simulation-supported case study

The early 1990's saw the rapid increase in interest in quality initiatives as operational costs increased together with the stronger lobbying power of interest groups and environmentalists. Moreover, the stronger presence of the Japanese and other Asian economies in the world market, which is generally attributed to improved quality and lower costs, has threatened the traditional stronghold of Western countries. These developments, coupled with advances in technology and product development, has encouraged many organisations to adopt Total Quality Management (TQM), as they search for approaches to improve their competitive positions in the world market, and more importantly, their own survival in these highly competitive conditions. However, attempts to implement TQM have not uniformly generated its promised benefits of improved quality, lower costs, customer satisfaction, and higher market shares. These mixed results have been attributed to a variety of reasons using theoretical and conceptual arguments, or empirical approaches such as surveys or case studies. Some of these attempts to explain the inconsistent performance of TQM have been criticised for failing to follow more rigorous methodologies, but more importantly, for pursuing objectives that do not necessarily lead to the better understanding of the TQM implementation process. Moreover, from the TQM perspective, some researchers have highlighted the weakness of this literature to address issues on definitions of quality, TQM and its related concepts; its underlying assumptions and conceptions; and, the contexts and contingencies that affect the implementation process. Furthermore, the generally prescriptive nature of TQM 1 literature has overlooked the inherent complexity of the entire TQM implementation system as its variables are intricately linked to each other to form feedback loops and as a result continuously adjust to each other. These weaknesses are addressed in this research through an extensive literature review, in-depth interviews and a computer simulation model with the goal of understanding the reasons for successes and failures of quality improvement efforts. The empirical findings of the study identified financial and temporal resource- factors that affected the quality initiatives. These resources provide for top management visibility, middle management involvement and support, budget availability, training, facilitation, an incentive system, opportunities to participate and contribute, and acquisition and development of new skills and ability. Moreover, the interviews and case studies generally supported the initial proposal that the TQM process is indeed a dynamic process with complex interdependencies and contextual factors. The theoretical findings fi-om the computer simulation revealed the multiple mode behaviour patterns of the TQM implementation process. The tests showed that the same factors can lead to both improving or declining trends for levels of participation and total project generated, depending on the conditions prior to the launch of the TQM programme and to the level of resources that are made available throughout the implementation process. Furthermore, it was demonstrated that some dormant feedback loops that involved the complexity of the problems and improvement areas addressed by quality circles were activated in the long run, causing the outcomes of the programme to slide down and collapse. As more efforts to identify further improvement increases, the next set of problems become more difficult to identify and complex to solve. This leads to frustration, de-motivation and decreased interest to continue idea generation and solution activities. This apparently inevitable collapse of a TQM programme in the long run was not resolved by the more traditional approaches of extending the life of the quality initiatives. Additional top management support and attention, more TQM staff and increased incentives were found to be largely ineffective in arresting the collapse of the programme. Indeed, these solutions only hastened the decline of participation and projects. More integrated solutions such as the control of frustration and difficulty through better training methods or TQM staff support also failed to prevent the eventual fall of the TQM programme. However, the approaches that were adopted by the Japanese, as they expanded the areas of operations of quality circles and the constantly improved products, equipment and processes, were found to be successful in sustaining participation efforts and improvement ideas generation. The results of the study suggest that the traditional conception of top management commitment needs to be expanded to include more active tasks such as the search for new ways to sustain employee efforts to become involved in quality improvement. As the complexity of potential improvement areas increases, the time left for top management to act on this impending collapse decreases. Thus, inattention to this concern at the beginning of the programme can only let the reinforcing loops operate and aggravate the situation as to lead to a condition where it is difficult, if not impossible, to correct the situation

Manufacturing standards deployment: An HOQ approach

The types and possible number of manufacturing standards that can be applied and implemented in different aspects of manufacturing creates a difficult decision situation to prioritize and focus organizational effort. As such, standards may haphazardly be implemented that do not lead to the intended improvement. This paper presents a methodology that was used in prioritizing the manufacturing standards in the Philippine furniture. It suggests that the standards to be adopted should be based on prioritized needs of the customer. It utilizes the concept of the House of Quality (HOQ), a methodology pioneered by the Japanese in deploying quality in the organization

A model for humanitarian supply chain: An operation research approach

© 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. The study presents a mathematical model for identification of the optimum location of a temporary or fixed facility in a certain geographic area being studied. Particularly, it is applied to Humanitarian Supply Chain where it seeks to identify the best location of temporary relief center operations in order to optimize the delivery of relief goods to the randomly dispersed evacuation centers. The paper seeks to optimize the movement of relief goods by minimizing the total transportation cost using Operation Research approach with the integration of Center of Gravity method. The center of gravity approach aims to locate a facility where it reflects equality of distances and demand volume in a network of customers\u27 locations. A case study was applied to use the model. The results revealed the geographic coordinates of the optimum location of the facility. The identified optimum location will have a total savings of 40% in the total transportation cost. Hence, by a significant reduction of the transportation cost will also mean a significant reduction of response time and delivery time of relief goods because these transportation cost are functions of distances of customers location and a function of volume of customers\u27 demand. The identified optimum facility location could also be a prepositioned location of relief goods covering the affected areas in the city. The proposed model for disaster facility location is easy to use and require simple tasks to implement. The model is readily accessible to managers and planners so it can be used in their planning

A developed mobile application for optimum facility location using center of gravity approach

This research is about the development, testing and application of mobile app for optimum location spot of a single facility. The approach is to use Center of Gravity Method to locate the central locations of the facility. This equality would reflect balance and minimum time and cost. The main variables to be considered in the systems are customer\u27s distance, customer\u27s demands and transportation rates. In general, firms which apply technologies will perform significantly better than those that do not. This leads to the development of a mobile app to identify best location for a single facility which will serve several demand centers. After the development of a mobile app, this undergoes testing which includes verification whether the mobile app will provide the same result in theoretical computations. The study confirms that the mobile app is consistent with the theoretical computations for location planning. This mobile app becomes a decision support system suggesting that they can access this mobile app to improve the firm\u27s performance on decision making. A faster and effective decision making since instead of manual computation which will take time, the computation will be in a few seconds plus you could visualize the geographic areas being investigated. Moreover, the mobile app is practical to implement because it is flexible and easy to use. The data needed is easy to gather. The mobile app can generate up to 100 iterations to ensure that global maxima is obtained. © 2018 IEEE

A system dynamics approach on the life cycle analysis of coal-fired power generator

With the world\u27s worsening environmental condition, different methodologies have been developed to assess the possible options to alleviate these problems. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a promising solution and methodology that uses modeling to predict the future or impact of certain activity. Along with these developments, the growing field of system dynamics modeling triggered the interests of many LCA practitioners in the possibility of using this type of analysis to address the changes of environmental impacts with respect to time. This study used a system dynamics approach in observing the dynamic life cycle impacts and the feedback relationships on electricity productions from coal-fired power plants and its relation to global warming that causes increase in ambient air temperature. Results showed that the introduction of alternative fuels and renewable energy systems could reduce the life cycle GHG emissions and thus improve the ambient air temperature on a system dynamics approach