APPLIED OPERATIONS RESEARCH / PRODUCTION AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT

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• Re-engineering a Total Quality Organization - Abstract: This article describes a case study of D2D Ltd, the manufacturing subsidiary of ICL. It makes use of the results of primary field research at D2D, including formal interviews and informal discussions with the senior management team, the quality manager and an internal quality consultant from the ICL parent organisation, together with extensive use of internal company data sources. Introduction: In the 1980s, total quality management (TQM) became the fashionable management philosophy of the West. This acceptance from well-known companies such as Xerox, Ford and IBM came about largely as a result of the success of Japanese industry. Canon overtook Xerox in the copier field. Honda and Toyota made huge inroads into the US automobile market. The Japanese had spearheaded the quality movement throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and now Western companies were determined to embrace the philosophy and practice which had enabled them to gain such a strong global presence. Despite many success stories, however, recent surveys have shown that up to 80 per cent of companies adopting TQM fail to show significant benefits[1]. There have been reasons put forward to explain this, ranging from an inability to absorb what is primarily a Japanese philosophy and culture, to the fact that TQM may take many years to show tangible benefits. The 1990s has seen an explosion of interest in what has become known as business process re-engineering. It promises to deliver rapid results and to be more suitable to accepted Western management philosophies. However, only a few years after the introduction of the term, there are reports that between 50 and 70 per cent of re-engineering efforts fail to achieve the goals set for them[2]). Many observers are now proclaiming the death of this the newest management "fad". Ironically, the more notable reported business process re-engineering successes have come from organizations with a strong tradition of total quality management. Whereas there has been a substantial amount of academic work published concerning TQM, to date there has been little on BPR. Indeed, the term itself has been in use for only four years. There has, however, been a recent explosion in the number of published case studies and comments from workers in this area. Several books have also appeared over the last two years. While much of this work is anecdotal, there has been a very clear attempt by many workers to provide objective data.