To help benchmark processes, support decision-making, and enhance the quality and safety of the process in question, quality tools put resources in the hands of organizations, managers, and employees as a whole. The advantages that some of the most important quality tools can provide are mentioned below.
Fishbone Diagram
One of the most popular quality tools is the fishbone diagram. There are several names for it, including cause-and-effect diagram, Ishikawa diagram, herringbone diagram, etc. The instrument aids in systematic breakdown of a problem's root causes (Jacobs & Chase, 2014). Once the causes have been clarified and distilled, the fundamental cause may be located and worked upon. For those who do not know from where to start a list of common cause areas can be listed down in order to start the process. It is an amazing visual tool that uncovers various causes and their relationship with each other. It helps in analyzing the root cause of the problem and find bottlenecks that might influence the productivity. For inter-departmental problems, it is a great tool to sit together and work on the problem at hand. Due to its immense benefits, it is being used in almost all the industries, be it services or manufacturing or marketing.
House of Quality
House of quality is a small subset of Quality Function Deployment (QFD). It allows us to design the products and identify which engineering characteristics which need to be included based on the voice of customers. The benefit of the system is that it is very scalable and can be applied to any level of design (Wilson & Hill, 2013). By using the tool, one can play around with different configurations of the system. Some of the other benefits that the tool offers is that it helps in increasing customers' satisfaction by incorporating their needs, reduces the need to change designs at later stages of development, improves quality of the system, saves time in planning, reduces the time that needs to develop the product and helps the designers in assigning priority to the design variables in hand.
Needs Analysis
Needs analysis is a versatile quality tool that helps in collecting all sorts of information about a need. The various tools offered by the approach such as feasibility analysis, goal analysis, performance analysis, contextual analysis etc. are very powerful in their own right. There are the tremendous amounts of benefits of taking up the approach. It helps in protecting the resources and assets of an organization by making sure that right resources are allocated to serving a need (Wilson & Hill, 2013). Any performance gap can be successfully identified and right training can be provided to bridge the gap. It helps us get an assurance that organizational resources are not wasted in training when an employee's performance gap can be bridged by using means other than training.
FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis)
FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) as a quality tool helps us in the identification of various possible fail points and modes and their effects. Analyzing the same helps us in coming up with ways to avoid those failure modes. It gives a logical representation of the processes, services, and products and makes analysis easier (Jacobs & Chase, 2014). It also assists in reducing cost and time involved. One can address problem areas such as customer satisfaction and reduced performance etc. Many companies have used the tool in order to identify failure points at a very early stage. Pre-empting such occurrences is a huge life saver for any company. They are also able to use it to recognize system interface problems which may occur. Avoiding such occurrences helps improve product safety.
SERVQUAL
SERVQUAL is a tool for measuring the quality of service provided. The instrument helps in benchmarking process. Service quality frequent benchmarking assists in improving the same to a great extent. It provides a valid and statistically sound tool for service quality analysis. Thus, the results derived from the tool hold much more validity and respect as compared to other traditional tools to measure service quality (such as questionnaires).
Decision Tree
Decision tree is a quality tool that provides a visual representation of decision-making process. The main benefit of the instrument is that it represents the effect of a particular decision (Jacobs & Chase, 2014). Analyzing decisions and their impacts, one can foresee various scenarios and make informed decisions. It helps in identification and visualization of all possible scenarios and assists in brainstorming sessions. It also aids in identifying important variables of a decision. The tool is applicable in almost every scenario and can be used by people of different professions.
Role of Internal Consultants
Internal consultants are indispensable for any organization in supply chain and quality initiatives. They offered an indistinctive competitive advantage as they are crucial in change management process (Cummings & Worley, 2014). Companies employ the services of internal consultants in order to economically implement continuous improvement and change management initiatives. Internal consultants in processes are much better than any other person; they help in negotiations with external consultants, if necessary. They assist in liaising with external entities to represent their organization. Any quality management initiative is a change management project as better processes are seen as a change to the existing ones. With every change comes resistance and internal consultants help combat it. They are, in many cases, drivers of change management programs. They help to spread awareness about the initiatives happening in the organization and assist in the development of plans and high-level strategies for successful implementation of the same. Another crucial role that internal consultants play in the whole process is that they identify key people for the process and then enable them to do their functions. It helps in bringing about the change in a smooth and efficient manner, which is not always an easy task for an external consultant to do. In other words, internal consultants assist in leading and controlling improvement and quality initiatives in an organization.Internal consultants also play a crucial role in improving the supply chain performance. Supply chain efficiency is dependent on various things and one of them is internal relationships (Basu & Wright, 2016). Internal consultants are the best people to know the types of relationship dynamics better than any other person. They are able to provide valuable insights pertaining to internal resource reduction analysis, internal resource reduction implementation, tackling with dynamics of internal politics and providing specific experience in certain areas which are inner and private to the organization.
References
Basu, R. & Wright, J.N. (2016). Managing Global Supply Chains. Taylor & Francis.
Cummings, T.G. & Worley, C.G. (2014). Organization Development and Change. Cengage Learning.
Jacobs, F.R., & Chase, R.B. (2014). Operations and Supply Chain Management (14th edition). McGraw-Hill.
Wilson, R. & Hill, A.V. (2013). The Operations Management Complete Toolbox (Collection). FT Press.
