1. Quality management in the organization.
In order to achieve the objectives of quality and excellence, and especially to achieve long-term sustainable results, the organization must create and continuously improve and update its governance structure and results.In improving and innovating in the organization’s capabilities, balance and increase the satisfaction of its customers and other stakeholders.
- products;
- processes;
- Organizational structures (including links between processes)
- own way of operational management of the organization;
- QMS and other integrated management systems.
In 1950, E. Deming drew the following diagram on the blackboard, presented in Fig. 1, to a small group of Japanese managers who listened to his lecture. In this Fig. 1 you can see a visionary new model of universal quality practice (VK) for an organizational schema formed on the basis of the strategic aspect.
Functional structure and operationalization
In a functional structure, the organization is divided into functions such as production, sales (marketing), etc., where each of them is headed by a manager. In such organizations, communication is predominantly vertical. The functional structure provides organizations with a clearly visible chain of command and allows employees to specialize in those aspects of work that suit them most. This is why functional structure is common in manufacturing and service organizations.
The functional structure is primarily designed for administrative purposes and from the point of view of the quality of training has many disadvantages, such as creating a large distance between the organization and customers – a small number of employees in functional organizations have direct contact with customers (consumers) and clearly understand how their work in the organization contributes to the work of other employees in the process of meeting the needs of consumers. The functional structure makes it difficult for employees to understand customer expectations and their satisfaction with products and/or services, which leads to a narrow perception of their responsibilities, most often expressed in statements such as “this is not my job” or “I only work here.”
They can’t help clients because they often have a very limited understanding of how their organizational system works, which usually leads to demotivation of employees and low quality of their work.
A large number of functional organizations are familiar with this phenomenon, which is explained as a situation in which a large organization tries to find help by moving from employee to employee until, by chance, someone is willing and able to help solve a particular problem. Since the needs of consumers are contained in the product and / or service as a whole, this means that limiting the knowledge and responsibility of each employee to the level of the function to which he belongs, makes it impossible to create quality and meet the needs of consumers. In particular, this means that each employee should have a broader idea of what the organization wants to achieve, that is, what product or service it should offer in the market and how they should contribute to this with their work.
Blocking process improvement in an organization: No organization can have absolute control over all processes, although most processes involve a large number of functions. The main reason for this is that the structure of functions in an organization does not correspond to the processes used to create products for customers. The functional structure most often creates complex, sometimes harmful, processes in which employees perform certain procedures on the product in one process that need to be redesigned or even canceled in another process.
An example of this in an organization is a group of engineers whose sole responsibility is to redesign products so that they can be produced efficiently and efficiently. However, engineers only care about the performance of the product and do not think about the organization’s ability to produce it qualitatively. If one function in the production process tries to improve its part of the work on the product, it can further worsen the existing situation (more time and effort, more cost) for another part of the product for which another function is responsible. Organizations striving to achieve universal quality (QC) often retain their own quality departments, whose functions are only to train and mentor staff responsible for quality, not to take primary responsibility for quality in the organization.
Thus, functional organization interferes with the overall quality of several
ways:
- It distances employees from customers and their expectations.
- complicates processes, harms them and prevents their improvement;
- It separates quality at the functional level from quality at the organizational level, creating an atmosphere in which no employee cares about quality outside of the function in which they work.