Date of Award

1995

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Business

First Advisor

Michael Castro

Second Advisor

Michael Kramer

Third Advisor

William Gibson

Abstract

The quality movement in American businesses is becoming increasingly popular. American businesses are now competing internationally for market and the Japanese are winning. American businesses have adopted various quality systems to help them become customer driven, assisting in the regaining of lost market share. Some companies have been successful in implementing a quality system, but most have fallen short of achieving the desired a quality operation.

Most of the successful quality programs have come in manufacturing plants, but quality in the support services of the administrative levels have fallen short. Many manufacturing organizations approach quality implementation for the plant and products, and ignore support service departments. In some cases, they try to apply the same techniques for both plants and service. As a result, quality problems that exist at the administrative level are not addressed and resolved.

A business does not become successful in today's increasingly competitive environment by limiting continuous improvement to its manufacturing components. Techniques exist that can be used in service industries. They can apply to internal services to work towards continuous improvement . To help move quality practices through a company's administrative services, a business should separate the needs of support services from those of the plant operations, by addressing those needs in a separate quality plan . It is this customization that will help businesses tackle the barriers that exist for implementing administrative quality.

This project develops the idea stated above and provides a model of such a plan.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Included in

Business Commons

Share

COinS