Have a nice day!
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January - March 1993
Have a nice day! The struggle for quality in service organisations
by Anne Tomes
manufacturer viewpoints. They alerted us to the need for training. Working on these principles,
Consumers have increasing expectations of quality. Service organisations have responded by standardisation of their procedures and intensive staff training
Japanese quality has become the standard for other
whether this approach leads to real quality of serv-
anecdotal evidence such as the following rather tall
in 'robot-like' behaviour. Anne Tomes questions
manufacturers to aim for, illustrated starkly by
ice.
story:
It is now four years since I last wrote on quality management in OR Insight ("Time for quality?",
For a long time a British engineering company had been unhappy about the quality of a high grade alloy component supplied to it. None of its suppliers was
Volume 2, Issue 1). Since then all the companies I
reported on have made progress and finally
achieved their goal of BS5750. The background to many of these commitments to quality was merely
survival; a catch-up reaction to the market and
able to meet the RQL of 8 per 1000 that the company
wanted. So an order was placed with a Japanese firm, acceptance being subject to the 8 per 1000 detective rater. A few weeks later the first consignment of a 1000 units arrived from Japan in 2 parcels,
competitive pressures. But now at last we are seeing
one big and one small. The big parcel contained 992 units, marked "perfect". The small parcel con-
building competitive advantage based on predatory rather than paranoiac instincts. In service industries particularly, the quality battle is being waged with
tained 8 units, marked "defective as required"I
more UK companies taking a pro-active stance,
vigour, but these advances are not without their
downside. You can hardly leave the counter of any fast food restaurant or reception of any business
organisation without being told to "have a nice day". This standardised script' seems to typify the initiatives of many service organisations to improve quality. Will somebody please allow me to have a really bad day if Iwant toI
Many service organisations are in the variability reduction era and not the TQM era
These initiatives are much more understandable if
we look at the roots of quality improvement programmes. Quality management has its roots in manufacturing. The preachings of Deming and Juran, prophets in a foreign land, heralded the
beginning of a quality revolution. They stressed the use of statistical information to measure the proportion of faults and more importantly to find solutions to problems. Juran introduced the concept of "f it-
ness for purpose" from both the consumer and
Copyright
1993 Operational Research Society.
As the service sector boomed in the 80s in the USA and the UK, quality of service became a big issue (Leonard and Sasser, 1982; Ross and Shetty, 1985:
Berry, Zeithaml and Parasuraman, 1985; Lewis,
1988) A major question arose, "How do you measure the quality of a s
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