University:
Duke University
Course:
ACCOUNTG 591 | Managerial Accounting
Academic year:

2023
Views:

490

Pages:

2
Author:

Bukan D

Resistance and Opposition Status of the Quality Improvement Program (April 1980) While the pilot program had been set up to run from early 1980 through November of 1980, by April, McKenzie and his 0&R management people felt a need to reassess their progress to date and decide just which avenues should be pursued, and how fast, over the next several months. While external (competitor and customer) pressures were adding support to the types of ideas incorporated in the quality improvement program, McKenzie and his people were concerned that they not confuse their own enthusiasm for and agreement on the program with that in the rest of the organization. Thus, in late March, McKenzie asked his group to provide him with information on the progress they thought Signetics had made over the preceding several months and to identify some of the major options that might be pursued as further steps in Signetics' quality improvement ef-forts. As McKenzie reviewed these reports, he concluded that significant progress had been made among his own quality and reliability management people with regard to terminology and definitions. Some things that seemed to be clearly in place included: 1. The Q&R managers generally understood the philosophy change represented by the decentralization of the Q&R function. While that decentralization was still in progress, at least those managers whose reporting relationships would be directly affected seemed to have a good understanding of what those organizational changes hoped to accomplish. 2. "Quality" had been redefined as "conformance to specification." Q&R people seemed to be in general agreement that everyone should "perform exactly like the stated requirements or cause those requirements to be officially changed to what the process could produce and what the customers really needed." 3. The Q&R group agreed that the major thrust of the improvement program was to stress prevention rather than correction. The notions that "it is better to plan for quality than to screen for it" and that "mistakes are not a way of life" seemed to be tying in nicely with the belief that a zero defects philosophy could be developed. While McKenzie felt confident that a strong consensus had formed within his own Q&R group, it was clear that others within the company still had a long way to go. One aspect of this was that of measurement and reporting. As part of the quality improvement program, McKenzie and his group had decided that the cost of nonconformance should be used as the performance measure for quality. While those procedures were not yet functioning, it was clear that there was already some growing opposition to this whole notion of the cost of poor quality. For some in accounting, this looked like a lot of work and they were already under pressure as an "overhead group" to keep the costs of accounting under control. A number of line managers had voiced considerable doubt, as to the likelihood of ever getting and maintaining accurate data on the factors in Exhibit and the negative motivational impact of telling manufacturing that their poor quality was the source of 15-20% (the preliminary number cited by Q&R) of total costs.