APS 4020 Module 10 Final Project: Quality Management in a Local Organization, a Paterson Wholesale Bakery Example

From Inspection to Improvement: A Total Quality Plan for a Paterson Wholesale Bakery

Student Name

B.S.B.A. in Operations Management, Thomas Edison State University

APS-4020: Applied Quality Management

Mentor Name

Month Day, Year

From Inspection to Improvement: A Total Quality Plan for a Paterson Wholesale Bakery

Introduction

The bakery employs 85 people and delivers bagels, rolls and breads each morning to about 300 supermarkets, delis and restaurants in North Jersey. It has a loyal customer base and recipes customers like, but last year it lost two supermarket accounts because of late deliveries and inconsistent bag weights, and about 2.3 percent of deliveries were returned or refused. Quality has been managed by inspection: packers pull bad products and the owner reacts to complaints. This report applies the course to that situation.

Assessment Against Total Quality Principles

Goetsch and Davis (2020) describe total quality as a comprehensive approach built on customer focus, continual improvement, employee involvement, a scientific approach to decisions and committed leadership. Measured against those principles, the bakery began the course weak in nearly every area: no systematic customer feedback, no data on its processes, decisions by experience, little training and a culture in which problems were hidden to avoid blame.

What the Data Showed

A four-week check sheet and Pareto analysis found that late deliveries and underweight bags caused 71 percent of returns. A cause-and-effect diagram built with bakers and drivers pointed to loading by finish order, an overheating mixer and a divider whose portions drifted during the shift. Control charts of bag weights confirmed the drift, with subgroup means falling below the lower control limit late in shifts, and showed a capability index of 0.81 against the lower specification, below the commonly used target of 1.33. A Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle on loading cut late truck departures from 21 to 6 percent in four weeks.

Why Implement Total Quality

Research supports the investment. Kaynak (2003) found that total quality practices, including leadership, training, employee relations, supplier quality and process management, improved firm performance largely through better operational results. Hendricks and Singhal (1997) found that firms with effective quality programs, identified through quality awards, outperformed comparable firms in operating performance in the following years. For a bakery that competes on dependability, operational gains are the business case.

Implementation Plan

Measures

The quality council will review these measures monthly, and results will be posted for all employees.

Customer Communication

Winning back the supermarket accounts requires showing buyers the change, not only making it. After three straight months on target for punctual trucks and accurate weights, the owner will call on the two chains that left, share the measured results and invite their quality staff to tour the bakery. The bakery will also send its largest customers a short quarterly report on returns, delivery performance and weight accuracy, a practice that signals confidence in the data and invites customers to raise problems early. Customer feedback from the quarterly calls will be logged and reviewed by the quality council with the other measures.

Employee Involvement and Training

The bakers' weekly meeting is the engine of the plan. Each month it will choose one problem from the check sheet or the control charts, run a Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle and report the result at the next council meeting. Every baker and packer will receive training in the basic tools, check sheets, Pareto charts, cause-and-effect diagrams and simple control charts, in four one-hour sessions during slow periods. New hires will learn the written procedures and the weight checks in their first week, with a trained baker as their guide. Each month the meeting will praise problems caught and solved, which keeps the shift away from blame going.

Sustaining the Gains

Gains fade when attention moves elsewhere. The council will keep the measures on its agenda every month even after targets are met, and each new hire's training will include the procedures and checks that produced the gains.

The council will publish the measures on a board near the time clock.

Its first review will set the dates for each phase.

Risks and Responses

The greatest risk is a return to old habits during busy seasons, when the owner may revert to blaming individuals and skip meetings. The council's monthly review and the written commitment from the owner address this. A second risk is cost: preventive maintenance and training will cost about $28,000 in the first year, but recovering one lost supermarket account would bring back more than ten times that in annual sales. A third risk is employee skepticism, answered by fixing reported problems visibly and quickly.

Conclusion

The bakery's quality problems are not mysteries; they are a few connected process failures that the course's tools identified and began to fix. Implementing total quality, with committed leadership, data, employee involvement and steady improvement cycles, can turn a bakery that inspects its products into one that builds dependability into every morning's work, which is what its customers want.

References

Goetsch, D. L., & Davis, S. B. (2020). Quality management for organizational excellence: Introduction to total quality (9th ed.). Pearson.

Hendricks, K. B., & Singhal, V. R. (1997). Does implementing an effective TQM program actually improve operating performance? Empirical evidence from firms that have won quality awards. Management Science, 43(9), 1258-1274. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.43.9.1258

Kaynak, H. (2003). The relationship between total quality management practices and their effects on firm performance. Journal of Operations Management, 21(4), 405-435. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0272-6963(03)00004-4