“Companies that grow through development and improvement will not perish. But when a company stops being creative, when it believes it has achieved perfection and now only needs to produce – it is finished.”
Henry Ford
The development and growth of an enterprise in a complex, volatile, hostile, and highly competitive environment requires the management’s focus on the issues of shaping the conditions and mechanisms for this development. The company’s management should devote the bulk of its intellectual and emotional energy to formulating and solving the most important problems related to the organization’s development and growth through the application of new management methods.
The globalization of markets, competition, and rapidly growing technological capabilities pose new challenges for companies. Hierarchical organizational structures, in which every employee had specific tasks to perform, are changing. Employees are becoming increasingly flexible, capable of performing various tasks and functions. Changes occurring in the global economy are prompting a modification of the existing, traditional perception of how an enterprise functions. A company’s reaction to changes in its environment is the use of new management solutions, such as: Total Quality Management (TQM), Reengineering, or Lean Management.
All the management concepts listed in Table 1 overlap with each other. The individual features of TQM, Reengineering, and Lean Management are similar to one another. After analyzing the topic, it can be concluded that the concept that most broadly describes management processes is Total Quality Management. This may result from the fact that this concept has been functioning the longest in both the scientific and practical spheres. Therefore, I have undertaken a comparison of the other concepts: Reengineering and Lean Management with TQM.
TQM and Reengineering
The following partial features of Reengineering are similar to TQM:
• Simplifying processes is nothing more than a continuous quality improvement process – for quality to be as high as possible, and for the possibility of negative manifestations to be as low as possible, processes must be simplified
• Performing work in the most appropriate place (outsourcing) refers to quality improvement techniques, primarily as cost analysis – decisions to outsource parts of business operations are in most cases dictated by the possibility of reducing costs
• Process teams in their functionality relate to quality circles in TQM – appointing teams to solve a specific task
• Continuous expansion of education is equally strongly exposed in TQM as a continuous process of education and training – for everyone employed to be involved in TQM, they must be convinced of the validity of such action, which is achieved through a series of training sessions and meetings with employees
• Changing the manager’s role from an administrator to an advisor and director – leader relates to the involvement of top management – for the implementation of the concept to be effective, top management must be fully committed and must “lead by example” for employees
• Modern information technology is used, among other things, for internal communication in the company – this is nothing more than the use of telecommunications solutions, internet connections, e-mail, and the construction of, for example, broadly understood intranet portals.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 2/2008.