Consistency in quality—A baseline for achieving total quality management

Interest in comprehensive concepts, such as lean enterprises, time-based competition and total quality management, has increased significantly within the engineering industry in recent years. Successful implementation of those concepts can to a large extent be explained by the ability to get information across to the employees and to make them involved and committed. Earlier research has shown that one of the key factors behind the successful implementation of changes in the quality area is to create clear goals that can be understood by the employees, combined with a culture that enables changes to be carried through. At the same time, it is probably safe to say that communication strategy is one of the least understood and most poorly managed aspects of the implementation of total quality management. As a step towards an understanding of how total quality is implemented and diffused in the engineering industry, the concept of quality consistency has been formulated. Quality consistency means the ability of an organization to bring about, based on a business concept and strategy and from a holistic, dynamic quality perspective, harmonization among all employees in terms of strategy and operations, so that they share a common and uniform view of the most important areas for the company's quality programme. The investigation was carried out in two phases. A broad study of more than 1000 white collar employees in 20 Swedish engineering companies investigated the overall attitude to the quality concept. In-depth studies were subsequently made in three of these companies in order to map in detail the level of quality consistency. The results show that top management do not seem to have been very successful in communicating information about the quality programme. Moreover, they seem to have been still less successful in creating a common understanding of the concept to be introduced and the way in which the work to implement it is to be carried out. The studies have clearly shown that there is a substantial divergence in attitude to the quality concept. This divergence can be assumed to have an adverse effect on the possibilities of efficiently carrying out quality programmes in companies. Consequently, it is reasonable to assume that all forms of company development in terms of quality ought to be based on a standardized approach to the concept. In addition, the studies show very low values with regard to quality consistency in the companies investigated. This indicates that there is a strong need for creating a uniform attitude to the quality concept and its implications for the employees as well as to its practical implementation both on an overall strategic level and on an operational level, to aid the individual in his daily work. Hence, the need for educational efforts to raise the employees' level of knowledge about how the quality work is to be carried out, e.g. which tools are available, and how they can take part in the implementation work, is extremely great. In the long term, education in schools and universities can partly meet this need. However, it is essential that companies themselves take an active part in this development, striving to raise the level of knowledge among their employees.