Sony & Xerox Corporation Production Methods Kaizen and Total Quality Management

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Business & Management                                        

Quality Research Task:

Xerox Corporation using TQM

Total Quality Management (TQM), is a management approach to long term success through customer satisfaction. This is achieved with all members of an organization participating in improving the products, process, services and culture in which they work in. It is seen as a way that a business can add value to its product and gain competitive advantage over its rivals.  There are 8 primary elements of TQM which are:

-Customer-focused

-Total employee involvement

-Process-centered

-Strategic and systematic approach

-Continual improvement

-Fact-based decision making

-Integrated system

-Communications

Xerox Corporation is an American multinational document management corporation that produces and sell a range of color and black & white printers, multifunction systems, photo copiers, digital production printing presses, and related consulting services and supplies.

Xerox Corporation has firstly focused on benchmarking, a reduced supplier base, and leadership teams as a way of producing total quality management.

 With benchmarking, Xerox is measuring the quality of its products and setting value. Xerox looks at what its rivals are doing and then sets a level of quality and value that all of its products are compared against. Once a product has met the standard, a new higher standard is set so that the company is continually improving and producing a higher quality product.

Xerox Corporation is also reducing its supplier base in order to achieve TQM. The supplier base is the amount of firms that an ordering company (Xerox), gets its raw materials from. Xerox has moved from individual suppliers for each of its manufacturing facilities, to groups of suppliers for all of the manufacturing facilities. . This in return cuts the number of suppliers needed which has therefore increased the accountability of the suppliers to get the materials to Xerox on time. Furthermore, this decreases some overhead costs from shipping reductions and economies of scale discounts.  With a small suppliers base, Xerox is able to make adjustments to its supplying methods without much difficulty, as there would be less problems arising, then if there were many different suppliers. In addition, a decrease in supplier base means that less employees are needed to manage and follow on the orders, resulting in decrease in positions.

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Xerox also uses leadership teams as a way of implementing TQM. These groups consists of individuals with different specialties. These groups each have an aim of producing a product with the lowest possible cost, yet has the highest quality.  

Xerox corporation will benefit greatly from TQM. The reduction of defects will take place as TQM promotes quality awareness and participation of all members of the organization.

Xerox will also benefit from easy problem solving as they have a reduced supplier base, and so have to deal with fewer suppliers.

Xerox would have also started a continuous improvement ...

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