Discussion Board



Discussion Board

Introduction

For this assignment, the potential area of improvement that has been chosen is the quality management initiatives. The industry that will be discussed here from the perspective of Total Quality Management is the 'Retailing Industry'. The companies that have been chosen to do discussion on the concern of quality management is the Wal-Mart Stores, lnc in the retailing industry, and the other one is 'Motorola' in the manufacturing industry.

Discussion

Firstly, it is highly essential to understand that what are quality management initiatives so that those initiatives could be better analyzed in both the companies of different industries. The initiatives of quality management come under the terminology of 'Total Quality Management', which is a strategic approach that finds ways for improving performance and quality which will exceed or at least meet the expectations of customers. When all the initiatives that are integrated with quality in all the processes and functions throughout the companies are achieved then it refers to as 'TQM' (Anand et al., 2010).

Wal-Mart is known as the “best-in-class” company because of its excellent practices of supply chain management. These practices have made the company able for achieving leadership in the retailing industry by increasing its operational efficiency and by bettering its customer service, and this is the quality benchmark of the Wal-Mart which has been continuously achieved by the company. In respect Motorola, as that is the well-recognized mobile manufacturing company of the United States, the benchmark is the continuous process improvements in their manufacturing operations and they does this by comparing the company's manufacturing, strategy, and process with other mobile manufacturing companies in the similar industry. In order to achieve the philosophy of TQM for the purpose of increasing performance, the companies are greatly required to set their benchmarks.

Figure - Why Benchmarking is needed?? ...