Industrial Engineering, January Essay Example for Free

Industrial Engineering, January Essay Recent studies commissioned by the Quality Research Institute (QRI), a partnership between Philip Crosby Associates Inc. and The Gallup Organization, reveal a startling gap between business executives and customers and their perceptions of quality and customer satisfaction. While a decisive majority (73 percent) of CEOs believe American business is committed to quality, QRI found that consumers overwhelmingly (84 percent) disagree. Similar discrepancies showed up when industry managers and end-user customers from three specific industries retail, hospitality and utilities were interviewed to compare their perceptions of overall customer satisfaction. These studies point to a flaw in how businesses define and measure quality, a flaw destined to hurt bottom-line profits. Quality, in the final analysis, is defined by customers. They must be satisfied and remain satisfied if a company is to prosper. As long as corporate performance is measured only in financial terms, quality will continue to suffer. To offset this problem, more and more companies are turning to independent quality audits, and they are reporting the results alongside financial reports to demonstrate success in achieving both profits and quality goals. Problems and opportunities The 1993 survey, Profits Versus Quality, illustrated both problems and opportunities in customer perceptions of quality. In this national survey, most consumers said they believed business was more concerned with profits than with delivering quality products or service. They also criticized business leaders for a lack of focus on quality workplaces. Most striking, however, was the widely held belief that business leaders who do not put quality ahead of profits are missing a big opportunity. Almost ninety percent of American employees said they would feel more committed to achieving their companys financial goals if their managers were more concerned with delivering quality to the customer. The three industry studies offer more detailed insight. In these surveys, executives were found to seriously overestimate the overall level of satisfaction even their best and most loyal customers have with their services. For example, more than 60 percent of retail executives believed quality of service had improved, while fewer than 30 percent of their customers bad noticed service quality improvements. In the hospitality trade, 70 percent of the hotel/motel executives in the study believed their hotels met customer expectations all the time or almost all the time. Only about 40 percent of customers agreed. The results in the utility industry were even worse. While 64 percent of electric utilities executives said quality has improved, only 9 percent of their customers agreed. QRIs surveys show clearly that relying on experience and gut feeling, do not work. Companies must determine what really matters to customers and act accordingly. A well-managed Quality of Service Audit (QSA) can identify and define customers real requirements, including those attributes such as trust and confidence, that lead to preference and loyalty. Regular customer measurements also can point out problem areas so corrections can be made before they have a negative financial impact. In addition, QSAs complement total quality management techniques by bringing customers into the quality loop. Since quality efforts eventually are reflected in profits, companies which take quality seriously should report QSA results alongside standard financial reports to shareholders. Thus, quality must be monitored as accurately, objectively and in as much detail as the companys finances. An effective QSA also should be based on the highest quality standards, including those specified by ISO 9000, as well as the criteria for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and the European Quality Award. Measures developed by such quality gurus as Crosby, Deming, and Juran also should be considered. In all cases, the quality audit must address all the product and service attributes that communicate value to the customer, lead to customer satisfaction, and affect customer preference. Figure 1 breaks out dissatisfiers versus satisfiers in the customers hierarchy of needs. Designing a useful quality audit To maintain the integrity of the audit, it must be done according to a strict process. Each research project is unique, but certain general guidelines always apply. Clear goals must be defined, and these goals must be incorporated into each phase of the audit, from questionnaire and sample design through data collection and analysis, if the results are to be accurate and projectable. Before the audit survey can be designed, serious consideration must be given to specific QSA goals and their relationship to larger organizational goals. In this phase, the company also should define the target population, identify specific concepts to be measured, and develop a general structure for the analysis. At this stage, it is important to get input from the kinds of people to be surveyed. Do the concepts to be measured make sense to the people who will be asked to provide service quality feedback? Is the domain to be evaluated (e. g. , client satisfaction and service excellence) adequately covered, or has something been overlooked? Are questions phrased in language that respondents use spontaneously when evaluating service excellence? This information will help pave the way for questionnaire construction. Particular care must be taken in this phase to ensure that issues of data completeness, response rates, and reliability are balanced with cost and time constraints. Data can be collected in several ways telephone, face-to-face interviewing, or self-administration by respondent each with different ramifications. For example, interviewer-administered surveys are more expensive, but usually have higher levels of cooperation, which, in turn, are essential to the reliability and projectability of survey conclusions. When designing the questionnaire itself, be careful that the order and wording of questions do not bias responses. In addition, the basic form of each question must be tailored to project goals. Also, should open questions be used to gain richer insights and identify new issues, or should response formats be standardized to facilitate statistical analyses? Once a questionnaire has been drafted, a pre-test should be completed to verify that the questions are easily understood and that interviews can be administered readily within a suitable length of time. With an appropriate questionnaire developed and pre-tested, the next phase is to select a representative sample from the target population identified earlier. Many statistical issues related to sample size and suitability must be considered. Random selection is just the beginning. The sample also must be tailored to meet the needs of the research goals. Dividing the sample into subgroups and sampling these subgroups separately helps enforce representativeness, and thereby improves the statistical efficiency of the overall sample. Stratification, in effect, reduces the margin of error statisticians calculate to allow for the possibility of uncontrollable error in the random selection process. Measurement frequency also must be considered. A survey designed to measure service quality, if it is to be linked to an action plan, begs for periodic measurement to assess whether the action plan is working. Turning reliable data into results All efforts to this point will be worthless if the people in the sample do not respond to the questionnaire. Gaining the cooperation of respondents is crucial because high rates of completion are one of the few ways to ensure the final survey results are not biased. Telephone interviewing is particularly well-suited to service quality measurements where the target population consists of professionals and executives. It provides for flexible cal1-backs to fit interview appointments into busy schedules. Non-response tends to be a much more serious problem in a self-administered survey because interviewers cannot intervene to expedite cooperation. Self-administered questionnaires require special attention to issues of clarity and ease of administration, as well as to devices that will help encourage cooperation. Once data are collected, the results must be analyzed in keeping with the initial research goals. The list of analytical tools available are a statisticians fantasy. Options include cross-tabulation, correlation and regression, including the multivariate version of each; many variations on factor and cluster analysis; multiple discriminant analysis; conjoint analysis; perceptual mapping; LISREL analysis; logistic regression analysis; log-linear modeling and on and on. Analytic methods should be chosen for their ability to provide precise answers to the research questions that have driven all the earlier phases of the research design. It is worth noting that a survey designed to provide an assessment of service excellence encompasses two related ideas by separate analytical tasks: understanding the dynamics of satisfaction and service excellence, and the relatively simple reporting of service quality measures developed in the course of this investigation. Practical and useful quality information Quality has become a strategic factor in the marketplace. Perceptions of poor quality service will ultimately be reflected in a corporations profit-and-loss statement. By measuring what customers really think about quality, QSAs can provide clear, practical, and useful information that will prove indispensable in the design of a program to achieve and maintain quality and service excellence. Jacques Murphy is senior vice president, managing director southeast division, of the Gallup Organization, Atlanta, Ga. J. A. Taylor is director of marketing for the same organization.

Universality and the Particular Essay -- Poetry Literature Authors Wri

Universality and the Particular â€Å"History,† Gilman writes, â€Å"is, or should be, the story of our racial life† (Gilman 216). Eliot is a bit less succinct, but perhaps he could be most pithily summed up as saying: â€Å"The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all† (Eliot 1919, 23). It is not immediately evident what either author means by these statements, however, they both contain the core of the argument. Both authors have their individual aims and intents with their writings, however, in spite of the differences, their arguments find more common ground than disagreement. Their terminology is certainly different, but they see the purpose and aims of literature as by and large the same. Literature, according to Gilman, originated as the â€Å"legitimate child of oral tradition, a product of natural brain activity† (218). Implicit in this, and made explicit elsewhere, is that literature is inherently a form of communication. And, â€Å"since our very life depends on some communication,† Gilman indicates very strongly that literature, both in its ancestry and in its current incarnation, provides an extremely important role in our existence† (218). She elaborates on this notion of communication, however, and specifies that a â€Å"passionate interest in other people’s lives†¦is the most vital art† (218). To her, the expression of the â€Å"great field of human life† is the task of all literature and is crucial to the very existence of society (218). We can presume that there is some bias in her argument, as people tend to think highly of their chosen craft. The essential element, however, is Gilman’s focus on t h... ...e essentially expansionist, forcing the borders outwards to include women in literature. Eliot, on the other hand, seems to be moving inward and examining and rejecting a certain type of reader, a certain type of poet. However, both, ultimately see literature as capturing the entirety of the human existence. The mechanism for doing so in their arguments differ greatly, but the intent and the final goals are the same. Where one speaks of the human soul, the other speaks of impersonality and mean the same thing. Works Cited Eliot, T.S. â€Å"The Impersonality of Poetry.† Issues in Contemporary Critical Theory: A Casebook. Ed. Peter Barry. London: Macmillan, 1987. 23. Eliot, T.S. â€Å"Hamlet and His Problems.† Hamlet. Ed. Cyrus Hoy. New York: W.W. Norton, 1963. 180-184. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Writings. New York: Bantam, 1989.

A review of P. Hirsch, Globalization, Regionalization

A review of P. Hirsch, â€Å"Globalization, Regionalization and local voices: The Asian Development Bank and re-scaled politics of environment in the Mekong region† By catktd90 A review of P. Hirsch, â€Å"Globalization, Regionalization and local voices: The Asian Development Bank and re-scaled politics of environment in the Mekong region† This paper was written by Philip Hirsch who aims to examine about globalization, regionalization and its effect to local people in terms of resource and environment.This paper also considers some key issues of re-scaling resource and environmental olitics in the Mekong region, and the extent to which challenges have been recast from national to regional development agendas by illustrating case studies in Laos and Thailand (Hirsch, 2001). Throughout the paper, Hirsch illustrates an important aspect of globalization directly related to sustainability, shows a fundamental change in thinking and speaking among government official and loca l people, and shows an interesting politics of environment in Thailand, with its shifting alliances and ideas about relationship between people and nature.In recent years, globalization and egionalization has been widening all around the world. Although it has some positive points, it also brings to nation and local people some negative points. According to Michael, Globalization is manufactured as a discursive negation of the possibility if nations defining their own futures (McMichael, 1996). For Hirsch, he explores the changing resource and environmental politics of the Mekong Region in the context of regional integration, with a specific focus on the Asian Development Bank (ADS) and its Greater Mekong Sub region (GMS) programme.In the Mekong egion, Asian Development Bank force for regionalization through the specific projects it has supported that have impacted on local communities and ecosystems. Globalization and regionalization in the Mekong region are temporally and spatiall y differentiated. While Thailand has thus explicitly articulated both with globalization and ant globalization discourses, in the case of Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia, it is difficult to separate the advent of globalization; Globalization has been witnesses not only the economic growth but also the financial crisis in Mekong region.However, hese countries have been influenced by development project which supported by ADB such as dam project etc. It is believed that Dam construction impacts on local communities' livelihood and ecosystem causing many problems to environment. For example, The Nam Theun-Hinboun Dam in Lao People's Democratic Republic (PRD) is one of ADB development project. It causes the insufficient water in dry season and flood in the rainy season as well as erosion of river banks in upstream and downstream.It also impacts on the local communities' livelihood such as fisheries, crops, etc. Warren claimed that from 30 to 90 per cent of fishery-related livelihood has been lost in the main impact areas (Warren, 1999). While there are number of some scientists still believe in the benefits of the dam in development process. It is clear that the local communities have to raise their voice to protect themselves from these attacks; however, it depends on countries politic.For example, in the case of Rasi Salai Dam on the Mun river in Thailand, the Dam completed in 1994 and effected livelihood and environment of a large areas. Because its serious effects, the local people established a protest villages. The protest Joined 16 other sets of villages with grievances throughout the Northeast to Join with the Assembly of the Poor in a national protest in Bangkok and finally, they were succeeded. But In the case of Laos or Vietnam, the people cannot do something like that because of their thinking and their countrys politic.It is obvious that economic growth always cause some consequences in livelihood or environment. In this situation, to adapt with globalizat ion and regionalization many countries build many infrastructure to develop their economy, emphasize large-scale planning. Finally, these things affect heir own country seriously in terms of environment and community's livelihood. Thus, it is expected that there will be a re-scale politics and environment not only in Mekong region but also in the world.In conclusion, globalization and regionalization is an ongoing process. Thus, this process needs more sustainable solutions for both the supporter (ADB and GMS) and the country which received financial for their economic development. One country should concern more about environmental problems when conducting any development project because a development projects need balance on economic, social, and environment aspect. In addition, a country should have their suitable policy on the road of development.REFERENCES Hirsch, P. (2001). â€Å"Globalization, Regionalization and local voices: The Asian Development Bank and re-scaled politic s of environment in the Mekong region†. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 22(3), 237-251. McMichael, P. (1996). Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams. London: Zed books. Warren, T. (1999). ‘A Monitoring study to assess the localized impacts created by the Theun- Hinboun hydro†scheme on fisheries and fish populations. Final report to the Theun- Hinboun Power Company.

Importance of the Past in Willa Cathers My Antonia Essay

The Importance of the Past in Willa Cathers My Antonia In My Antonia, Willa Cather emphasizes the importance of the past through Jum Burdens narration. Jim Burden realizes at the conclusion of the novel how much he enjoyed his childhood days and how much his memories mean to him. There are three events that Cather included in the novel which contribute greatly to the overall theme, concerning the importance of the past. One event is in Chapter II of Book III. Jim decides to write about his youth in Nebraska as Vergil has just done. As he is thinking about this, Lena Lingard comes to the door and he is excited to see her. Once again he begins to think about the past. Even after she left, just her presence had impacted his†¦show more content†¦He spends a day in Black Hawk that ends in a disappointment since none of his childhood friends are around. Walking out to the edge of town, he finds a half-mile stretch of the old wagon-road which used to run like a wild thing across the open prairie. The memory of his first ride over that road comes to him strongly. Now he feels that this road has brought him and Antonia back together. It is the road of Destiny along which their lives have traveled. Another event appears in chapter 14 of book II. Antonia and Jim are having a picnic by the river. It is an important event for many reasons. First, the past is brought up, when Antonia says, It would be like old times. The reader can only be reminded of the events that have taken place in Book I. For example when Jim walks two miles towards the river. At the riverbank he takes a swim and realizes how much he will miss this river once he goes off to college. Jim skated, swam and fished on this river throughout his childhood. Second, it is the last shared afternoon of Jim and Antonias youth. Throughout their youth, Jim and Antonia share a number of memorable moments, like the time when Jim teaches Antonia how to read. However, this is their last day together in their childhood. Soon, Jim will be going away to college so the future is near. Then, he finds Antonia crying because she is looking at overhanging bushes that remind her of Bohemia. It makes me homesick,Show MoreRelatedEssay on Use of Environment, Landscape, and Cycles in My Antonia3310 Words   |  14 PagesUse of the Environment, Landscape, and Cycles, in My à ntonia       The landscape and the environment in Willa Cathers, My à ntonia, plays several roles. It creates both a character and protagonist, while it also reflects Cathers main characters, Jim and à ntonia, as well as forming the structure of the novel. Additionally, it evokes several themes that existed on the prairie during the time in which the story takes place. 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