Strategic Quality Riordan: Management And Customer Satisfactio

Strategic Quality Management and Customer Satisfaction

Introduction

The Strategic Plan of an organization is the most efficient and resourceful plan an organization can implement. Riordan takes immense pride in the strategic plans in place for the manufacturing organization. Through the strategic plan, the organization could improve current business processes, measure the quality of their customer base, review quality assurance and improve their process improvement plan. Through these plans their process has a strategy and direction with the ability to allocate resources in order to generate capital and increase excellent customer satisfaction among their customer base.

Quality: Company Strategic Plan and Objectives

Riordan Manufacturing has been in business for many years; they have been the industry leader of plastic manufacturing for decades and want to ensure they continue to see increased success and revenue. To ensure continual growth, Riordan is constantly making process improvements, modifying their strategic plan and setting new objectives.

Riordan’s current strategic plan is to strengthen the Riordan brand and make it a significant advantage in the marketplace by introducing environmentally friendly products, and establish a known leadership in the production of beverage containers and bottling. To support their strategic plan, Riordan’s objectives is to have a $50Million operating income, increase their market share by 20%, increase employee satisfaction and productivity by 15%, and reduce operating costs by 10% by streamlining current manufacturing processes.

To execute their strategic plan, Riordan Manufacturing plans to “implement empowered focused development teams to deliver the roadmap for improvement” (Riordan Manufacturing, 2008) as well as streamline the entire organization to drive the spirit of quality through culture. By setting clear objectives and streamlining processes, Riordan is ensuring that they continue to see the deployment of quality of products and is reassuring their leadership in the marketplace.

Analysis of Process Improvement Plan

The Riordan Company is currently using scorecards to keep take of what the company wants to achieve and what the company has achieved. This company also uses Six Sigma to form an improvement process. Focus on achieving and maintaining reasonable profitability to assure that the financial and human capital is available for sustained growth. (Riordan Manufacturing Confidential Proprietary, 2007) Using the scorecard makes it so that the company can see exactly who is responsible for certain tasks and if those tasks are achieved than the company can see what the reward will be. Having those goals in place allow the employees to know that they are making a difference within the company. The scorecard is also along the lines of a check sheet, a check sheet is generic and can be used for many different reasons, this way of collecting data could be changed a little to ensure that the data being collected and the jobs that are being performed best suit the company.

Tools and techniques to measure quality

Quality tools and techniques are used to analyze and understand and measure quality in any industry. Riordan uses several quality techniques and tools to improve the process of making plastic products in their manufacturing plants. The quality tools used include control charts, surveys; and newly implemented is the six-sigma process. In addition, examples of tools and techniques are used to measure quality and customer satisfaction within Riordan to help develop Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Material Requirements Planning (MRP). To improve the variability in production data is collected using these tools and techniques.

Riordan uses a control chart to review and understand the magnitude variability becomes over time. “A control chart is a graphical tool that can be used to understand a production process and help assure that the quality of products produced by that process is consistent (or stable) over time (Burrill and Ledolter, 1999). Riordan will use the X-bar chart to establish an outline of the variability of the new plan they have designed.

Riordan will plan a survey by first preparing for it. Then a conduction of the survey will take place followed by a report of the specific findings. Furthermore, Riordan will plan for the objectives of the survey. In Riordan’s instance, the objective is to have customer satisfaction of their product. Survey questions help to maintain a quality product that the customer may enjoy.

Example survey:

1. Timely production, was the customers product produced and delivered in a timely manner?

a. Delivered on time

b. Delivered before the promised time

c. Delivered after the promised time

2. Satisfaction with product delivered; did the customer receive a product that was up to your standards? Color, size, dimensions, etc.

a. Above Satisfaction

b. Satisfied

c. Below satisfaction

Riordan will also use the Six Sigma process. A primary objective of six-sigma programs is to design and improve products and processes so that product specifications are reliably produced. “In a six-sigma approach, sources of process variability (represented as sigma) are identified and reduced, thereby lowering the process output’s sigma” (iSixSigma, 2000-2008). The implementation of the six-step six sigma process will help Riordan to assess the variables created in processing. The first step is to define who the consumers are, what their desires are, what the strategy is, what processes are used and the measures used for accuracy. Second, is to measure the variability with the selected tools. The third step is to analyze the measurements taken to decide the specific places of occurrences. Forth, Riordan must improve the process to minimize the rate of the variability. Then it will be necessary to control the process modifications that are needed to improve the process without causing long-term damage to the process.

The final step is to make sure the six-sigma cycle is continuous. (iSixSIgma, 2000-2008)

The final tool and technique will be implemented by the Chief Informations Officer, Maria Trinh. She will help Riordan to integrate ERP and MRP systems

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