Formal quality management is a system which centers on identification of documentation of management activities and implementation of design with determination of quality policy in engineering and procurement. It includes specifications of management requirements and quality assurance to the customers needs.
According to Vonderembse and White (2003), the cost of quality is the calculation of the waste or losses in a procedure such as plant and production line. It can track changes of a process and the comparison of two or more processes. Cost of quality is calculated through the man-hours lost or spent multiplied by rate per hour. Therefore, the following paragraphs analyze the concepts of quality management at HanesBrands Company.
HanesBrands Company is a material and clothes company based in North Carolina. It has many clothing brands, including Hanes – the biggest brand, Champion and Playtex.
The company has many factory outlets all over the US; it has companies in United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, Spain, and France. Its main approach on the cost of quality is prevention of costs. This involves avoiding defects established through statistical process control to detect whether a process has deviated from its normal operation, which causes defective units due to machine failure.
Here, workers use tools and techniques for evaluation or spotting the deviated processes. These tools include: process flow charts, maps, and diagrams. If there is any problem with the processes, it is identified and current performance is reviewed with recommendations for improvements and further defects are prevented. Therefore, the mentioned approaches are called quality improvement programs (Anderson, 2010).
At HanesBrands, employees are responsible for quality improvement because of the company’s values, which include diversity, integrity, and commitment. (HanesBrands, 2010). Additionally, the company ensures that it designs products which are easy to produce, and production becomes easier with high quality products rather than depending on inspections to spot defects.
The company has effective assessment activities which prevents internal failure costs that occur when a product fails to follow its design specifications. This saves the company from shipment costs of defective products that can be rejected by customers and the time used to produce them. Thus, these defects are avoided with evaluations.
There are several factors that determine the success and failure of quality initiative, and they are common in Hanes Company. Planning is the first factor, and it entails following steps in product design verifications and specifications to produce high quality products. Quality control is also another factor which involves the activities or controls that directs a company in improvement of processes.
It focuses on customer requirements where the organization is able deliver products and services according to customers needs. Performance measurement ensures that customer requirements have been met. This is done by identifying the processes that have deviated from the organizational goals while coming up with solutions for improvement.
Another factor is the workforce involved. Armand (2000) argues that developing people and team is an important factor of quality initiative because people are taught through personality models of forming, storming, norming, and performing; people are motivated and able to work well with creativity. Likewise, the selection of employees to do a certain task is vital with assessments of their performance. Thus, training gives employees the confidence to undertake a given task.
Management of a process is another factor, and the methods of process improvement. The process management has four key roles: the process workforce who are responsible for delivery of goods; the process sponsor ensures there is enough resource for improvement of a process; the process owner is responsible for end-to end process and drives development idea; and the process manager who is responsible for detached parts of a process and provides reports and improvement ideas.
Therefore, total quality management is recommended for companies with manufacturing environments for higher profitability and improved stakeholder satisfaction.
References
Anderson, D. M. (2010). Cost of Quality. Web.
Armand, F. V. (2000). Total Quality Control (3 ed). New York: McGraw Hill.
HanesBrands, Inc. (2010). Our Values. Web.
Vonderembse, M. A. & White G. P. (2003). Operations Management: Concepts, Methods, Strategies. St. Paul, MN: West Publishing.