Introduction
The following is a critical writing on how to improve the Kingfisher Airline after the company’s compromise of quality that led to poor performance. The following essay gives details on how the company may improve the quality using the Denning’s points of maintaining quality in times of crises.
The essay will apply the Juran’s quality and suggest the way forward for survival and growth. It will assess quality circles in making the Airline better, more efficient, reliable, and cost effective. There are poka yoke devices that may be used to avoid errors. The final part of this essay will discuss how Taguchi loss function applies to make sure that the flights of the company are always in time.
Denning’s View on Kingfisher Airlines. Denning is one of the top quality management gurus and the father of Total Quality Management. As per Denning’s points, Kingfisher Company has compromised some key aspects of the airline services creating a loophole in the company thereby reducing efficiency.
The first compromise is lack of focus where Denning indicates that focus on what to provide and the quality of the products provided is of importance. Kingfisher compromised on this aspect when the management purchased low quality airbuses and then made it appear high class (Petersen 468). The low class airline compromised the earlier image that the company had developed as first class airline in India.
To succeed in its purpose the company must replace its short-term plans with long terms plans. Long-term plans help the company to focus on the key values rather than on the activities that are done all the time. When focusing on quality the company’s management must take responsibility over what is happening in the organisation rather than blaming the company woes on the employees (Petersen 468).
Kingfishers ignored Denning’s rule of total quality management of focusing on quality rather than on the numbers. The company woes increased when the company bought low quality airline in order to have more customers without increasing value. This made the airline offer low quality service to the customers.
The company has to move towards one supplier if it is going to avoid instances of having the suppliers failing them. The management is the major cause of failure due to inadequate planning on how to adapt to changes. The company must also ensure that they work towards improving quality of the services constantly.
In providing quality, the company must stop management through objectives strategies where an objective seeks to increase production and not quality. Kingfisher Airlines sought to increase the destinations without first improving quality. The company must also embark on an in house retraining program of the staff (Mangelsdorf 494)
The Company has not retrained or organised an in house training for their staff for a long time. Denning proposes that a company must keep on training the employees to keep up to date with the changes in the market. This reduces staff redundancy and inefficiency within the company.
The company needs to create mechanisms that will check on the quality provided by the company every day. Awareness of the necessity of quality in the company is essential to the growth and survival of the company. Actions that compromise quality of the services offered by the company are threats to company future prospects (Selden 46).
Application of Juran’s Spiral in the Context of Kingfisher Airlines. Application of Juran’s quality spiral may assist Kingfisher to survive the losses and get the customers back. Juran’s quality spiral focuses on three major aspects of quality management. The first one is quality planning where the organisation engages in formulating strategies that focus on delivering quality services to the customers.
The plan must focus on attaining effectiveness in the company. This is where the company looks for ways of improving service delivery to the customers. The plan has to identify the needs of the customers first. Juran advocates for the company to identify major customers in the plan and ways in which the company will offer quality services.
In planning, the company must know the needs of customers and look for ways of satisfying them. Quality planning is therefore identification of the needs of the customers and the ways to provide them (Juran 38)
Quality control is another concept that Juran brings out. This involves development of the product and how the products that already exist are improved in order to satisfy the customers’ needs. Quality control involves training the staff to produce the best products and services.
It involves ensuring that the customers are satisfied with the services offered by the company. The quality improvement of Juran is also a continuous process based on the changing customer needs. For an organisation to offer quality, it must focus on providing customer satisfaction (Juran 44)
These principles are applicable in the case of Kingfisher Company although they were for production companies only. For Kingfisher to survive it must engage in quality planning by identifying the customers whether they are high-end customers looking for flying experience or low-end customers seeking to reduce their travelling costs.
For the company to progress there is need to create a well-defined target market that the company is reaching out. At first, the company started with a focus on the high-end customers but the compromise on quality led to low-end customers. Identifying the customers makes it easy to have focus on the kind of service or specialisation that the company will engage.
Failure by the company to identify the target customers makes it inefficient, as it cannot fully satisfy their needs prompting them to look for alternatives. The management should ensure that there is enough information on the services that customers would be willing to have in order to ensure that their expectations are met.
Currently, the company has mixed services both high end and low end and a target to reach out to as many destinations as possible. Due to the low quality services offered by the company leading to customer dissatisfaction, the company ticket sales have gone down.
In addition, the suppliers as part of the internal customers are dissatisfied with the company operations such that they no longer supply fuel to the company on credit (Juran 61).
Poka Yoke Devices to Help Kingfisher Employees. The Poka Yoke devices otherwise known as the mistake proofing devices developed by Shigeo Shingo can reduce the errors and mistakes happening in Kingfisher Airlines and thereby help the company to avoid losses that result.
Shigeo Shingo explains that the purpose of the mistake proof devices is to detect errors as soon as they occur. Errors that reach to the customers have greater implications and affect the company negatively. There are serious errors occurring in Kingfisher Company such as flight cancellation leaving inconvenienced and agitated passengers looking for alternative means of transport (Shingo 22).
The company can avoid these errors by checking on the condition of the aeroplanes before allowing customers to book flight. This ensures that problems such as low fuel and malfunctioning airbuses are solved before they are booked for flight. Failure to institute a mechanism to check the conditions of the buses liners before engaging them for flights will lead to flight cancellations.
The company must also install automatic services for the liners to detect the state of the airplanes before flight. The issue of missing delicacies in the airliners menu is major defect that affects the quality of the services offered and the brand image of Kingfisher airline. Just in time mechanism of booking the flights according to the availability and efficiency of the jets will reduce cases of flight cancellation (Shino 39).
The company can reduce mistakes using automated or computerized machine systems that record malfunction in the systems. The implementation of a relevant Enterprise Resource Planning technology to assist the workers in early detection of errors and alert possible flight cancellations can help the company to handle any likely failure of flight in advance such that the company notifies passenger unavailability of flight on time.
The Enterprise Resource Planning not only takes into consideration the aircraft but also has customization to handle pay rolls for the organisation employees as well as making fuel orders in advance. With such kind of technology working in the company, errors will be in control and the management can thus work to improve other quality aspects (Shingo 75).
Application of Taguchi’s Quality Loss Function in the Company. Before Taguchi’s work on the quality loss function, there was no perception by managers that variation in quality is a source of monetary loss.
Taguchi was the first to describe quality in terms of costs. Loss in quality reduces the perceived value of the good or service in the mind of the potential customers. Maintaining quality is therefore imperative in ensuring the profitability of the company (Nair 127)
Kingfisher could benefit from quality improvement of the services, as it would maintain the loyal customers. Quality will make the investors gain confidence on the company such that banks will start offering loans to the company.
This is where the company will benefit most, as it will manage to pay the employees on time and purchase the fuel. The losses accumulated from loss of quality are higher than the costs incurred in maintaining quality of the services (Nair 129).
In the case of Kingfisher Airlines, there are a number of ways in which the company can reduce quality variations that affect the reliability and predictability of the company flights. The company should have mechanisms to handle errors that are beyond control. Having a jet to replace the airbuses that malfunction will help the company avoid flight cancellations (Selden 33).
The low quality food served to customers can be improved when the company introduce specified menus that are to be available during all flights. This avoids the instances of missing delicacies in the menu, which are needed by the customers according to the tastes and preferences.
The other quality function is to have well designed aircrafts that are suitable to fly in any weather condition such that there are no delays due to unfavourable weather conditions. Explanations of jet servicing when it is booked for a flight should cease in order to avoid delay.
The management should reduce the number of flights to ensure that the airbus servicing is done properly and in advance. It is better to have few flights than to cancel flights. This makes the company to be perceived negatively by the customers (Nair 130).
Conclusion
The gurus of quality management has done a lot to assist companies understand the correlation between quality and profitability of an organisation. Without meeting customers’ expectations by offering services that they perceive have value the company is likely to experience reduced sales because of customer dissatisfaction.
When the customers are satisfied they will always prefer the services of the company and ignore other companies that offer similar services. Quality guarantees value and reliability that generate trust and loyalty from the potential customers. Kingfisher Airline Company lost customers when it started to compromise value through buying cheaper airlines and offering low quality services.
The Company can however recover through offering quality services in order to increase the revenue generated. The quality will come through reliability of the flights and reducing the number of flights to ensure that they have well prepared crew and no aircraft is booked for a flight without a backup and thorough inspection.
With quality control mechanisms in place the company will return to its initial position due to the well planned marketing, which has helped it survive otherwise it would have collapsed due to the fatal mistakes.
Works Cited
Juran, Joseph. Quality Planning and Analysis: From Product Development through Use. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980. Print.
Mangelsdorf, Diana. “Evolution from Quality Management to an Integrative Management System Based on TQM and its Impact on the Profession of Quality Managers in Industry.” The TQM Magazine 11(1999): 6. Print.
Nair, Victor. “Taguchi’s Parameter Design: A Panel Discussion.” Technometrics 34 (1992): 127. Print.
Petersen, Benn. “Total Quality Management and the Deming Approach to Quality Management.” Journal of Management History 5 (1999): 8. Print.
Selden, Paul. Sales Process Engineering: A Personal Workshop. Milwaukee: ASQ Quality Press, 1997. Print.
Shingo, Shigeo. A Study of the Toyota Production System from an Industrial Engineering Viewpoint. Portland: Productivity Press, 1989. Print.