Quality Management Term Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Quality Management - Term Paper Example This review focuses on Mike Bolton’s published issue- ‘Get Staff Involved in Quality Initiatives.’ Mike Bolton, the Vice President of ATC, a public transportation company, explored an entirely new quality initiative. He went out of the ordinary Six Sigma to the risk of involving employees-whose loyalty was not guaranteed-in quality initiatives. This was a daunting task that many critics doubted its feasibility. Bolton’s motivation for a new quality initiative was the economic downturn in 2000 when it merged with a global transportation service. He thought that adopting the Six Sigma would be costly in terms of time and finances considering their budget at the time. Together with ATC’s CEO, Jim Long, Bolton adopted the Action Workout initiative. This incorporated leaders and employees alike in quality improvement. Teams were deployed to each of ATC’s branches; this consisted of leaders and employees. Each team had one leader and six employees, their focus was improving one of the laid down key profitability driver at its location. Each location was put on a 60-day clock on the start and finish and assumed ownership of the results. The teams were encouraged to localize best practices, this enhanced member enthusiasm and creativity. Among the ideas put into action were trained teams comprising of defenders of safety whose main concern was to reduce accidents. They established the root cause of accidents to be failure to perform vehicle inspection. They established the ‘red dot’ inspection initiative to counter this. The other team was the ‘budgeteers’ team. Their focus was overtime expense reduction. This was achieved by routine vehicle fueling, maintenance timing and reporting accuracy among others. Every vehicle and every driver were tracked every day. Teams that produced the best results were awarded. The company also learnt a number of insights: the need to think carefully about team