Quality News

One apparent advantage of being relatively small is that you needn’t bother with the big nostrums that gurus and consultants love to sell to big companies. Or is it an advantage? What if TQM (Total Quality Management), say, is the right road to making money?



In many businesses, top-class quality is actually becoming the only road. If you’re supplying giants (for example, in cars) they may well insist on quality certifications like BS5750. Getting these can be expensive and burdensome; they don’t require plunging into TQM – but if you’re going to all that trouble, it makes sense to launch a total quality drive.

Total quality made much sense to Jack McGavigan, just retired, in his 80s, as chairman of John McGavigan & Co, founded by his grandfather in 1860. The family firm was a traditional printer, but developed from the Sixties into specialists in ‘graphics related plastics technology.’ Touch switches and backlit fascia panels in cars are examples of the uses. McGavigan, rightly keen on innovation, has constantly expanded into new technologies and product lines. Consequently, the group’s car parts have a 12% world market share.

None of this might have happened if McGavigan hadn’t reacted to impending crisis in mid-1987. Costs were rising, the company was being squeezed between strong suppliers and stronger customers, and competition was intensifying. The firm had been using quality circles for years – with employees banding together to tackle quality issues, Japanese-style, in a voluntary, bottom-up effort to improve. But more was needed to avert disaster.



Quality was the answer, passionately advocated by Edward Smith, 47. Managing director of John McGavigan Automotive Products, he joined the company as a stripling in 1963. ‘Employees are the experts’, he says. ‘We wanted to exploit the potential of people,’ which demands ‘training, teams and communication.’
read full text Thinking Managers