Quality Management - participation and empowerment of an employee

Nowadays organization can not think without quality management at their workplace. In this article we will read about participation and empowerment of an employee. Participation means that management actively encourages participation in running the operation and improving the business process. Empowerment is something additional. It means that management recognizes that when employees are given training and provided with the correct information, they are in the best position to manage their own work processes. This being the case, employees should be empowered to do it.

There are various techniques to solicit employee participation. Suggestion schemes work well when they are well published and when valuable rewards are provided. If all of your needs and wants are satisfied you judge that you have received excellence. Excellence is more than meeting a product requirement because a requirement only provides a minimum set of supplies. Excellence or Quality is being pleased that your expectations have been met and exceeded. Organizations need to develop a range of measures or set of quality standards that get a handle on various categories of quality costs. These include quality costs that illustrate up in the plant and quality costs that illustrate up when the product has reached the customer.

Quality costs include the costs of scrapping material throughout production, the cost of reworking faulty or defective material, the cost of repairing products, and warranty costs. Business rely on quality inspections to weed out defects are found products are either scrapped or reworked. This is rather like having two plants under one roof. There is one plant turning out good quality products that comply with customer needs. Then there is another hidden plant that turns out defective products for the scrap metal merchants and rework products that were defective in the first place. This hidden plant is may be half or a quarter the size or even smaller than that of the real plant.

Quality costs are huge and they must be measured if there is to be any expect of improvement or development. The information provided by a well designed cost tracking system helps management to focus their efforts on the high cost effective areas and track how well designed cost track how fine the improvement efforts are going. Quality costs and preventive costs give better ROI. Failure costs in organization that does not have an effective quality management program for their process and employees. They include costs associated with scrap, rework, repair and guarantee actions.

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