Needs Assessment For Quality Improvement Paper

Total Quality Management Survey

In order for any organization to survive the fierce competition in the business world, the organization must be aware of opportunities to grow and reduce costs and be supported by Total Quality Management Process. The TQM process helps the company create new products ensuring the utmost standards of quality and customer satisfaction is achieved, which is the main goal of TQM process. In addition, the TQM process also helps in improving a company's bottom line profits by increasing operating efficiencies, eliminating waste, and creating working conditions conducive to productivity and company growth. The company's employees work in a healthy environment, which maximizes their efficiencies and enables them to perform at their best levels. In both the short-term and long-term, the quality improvement process pushes the company from different angles to achieve strategic goal and plans.

This paper will explain the value of quality in relationship to customer satisfaction within the sectors of services, nonprofit, and government. The three organizations are:

Service Sector - Texaco Gas

Nonprofit - Habitat for Humanity

Government Sector - United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS)

A matrix, outlining the differences between the strategic roles of TQM within each sector will be included.

Quality in Relationship to Customer Satisfaction

Service Sector

Services are defined as a form of business providing various types of labor services in a wide variety of business sectors and typically produce intangible products such as education, delivery services, and entertainment. Examples include a house cleaner service that provides housekeeping services, a nursing home that provides 24-hour care for geriatric patients. Furthermore, services are usually produced and consumed at the same time

Value of Quality in Relationship to Customer Satisfaction

Services are different; services are not an inventory. People in a restaurant, for example, will not all order the same meal. In addition, doctors will not diagnosis each patient the same way. These examples show that different types of services are usually not the same for all people, which makes it difficult to standardize services. Services generally have a high customer interaction, which will vary depending on the needs and wants of each customer.

Customer Driven Quality

Service - Texaco Gas

For more than 100 years, Texaco has been operating in the United States; Texaco was founded in Beaumont, Texas. In 2001, Texaco and Chevron merged into one organization. As part of the merger agreement, Chevron turned over temporary rights to the Texaco retail brand to a competitor who began selling gas under the Texaco retail name. Chevron regained the rights to the Texaco retail brand in July 2004 and began selling gas under the Texaco name. Operating more than 2,200 service stations in the U.S., Texaco has expanded the company's products to sell in all 50 states including the District of Columbia. Texaco offers a credit card to customers, which are accepted at all Texaco, Chevron, and Xpress Lube outlets (Texaco, 2007).

Texaco Gas stations, a division of Texaco/Chevron, want to ensure continuous customer satisfaction, so the organization provides not only gas to the consumers but also provide the following services to make the customer's experience as convenient as possible (Texaco, 2007):

Websites coupons and more

Approved credit cards

Convenience stores

Open 24 hours

Pay at the pump convenience

Propane

Service bays

Car washes

Diesel fuel

Truckstops

The Texaco brand is one of the most familiar and trusted gas brands in the world, thus it provides many different services to customers always on the move.

Nonprofit - Habitat for Humanity

Nonprofit organizations (NPO) generally do not operate for profit; however, there may be substantial profit in the organization. Paid employees and volunteers manage NPO's. In addition, NPO's have members, participants, or beneficiaries rather than customers in a for-profit organization (Wikipedia, 2007).

NPO's will accept, hold, and disburse money and other things of value; then legally and ethically traded for a profit. However, the use of the profit may have restrictions or constraints. NPO's are usually funded through donations from private and public sectors and offer a tax-exempt status or tax deductible (Wikipedia, 2007).

Customer satisfaction is measured by the satisfaction the recipients of new homes derives from the service received. A good test of a recipients satisfaction can be answered with the question, "Is there a smile on the recipient's face?" If the answer is yes, the recipient is satisfied with the home he or she received. Habitat for Humanity does not give away money; the funds are not handouts. The Habitat has enabled thousands of low-income families to find new hope in the form of affordable housing (Habitat for Humanity, 2007).

Total quality management elements of Habitat for Humanity include the capacity to build new houses for recipients in need, motivation of people to contribute or volunteer and to make monitoring simple to keep track of progress made. Habitat for Humanity was founded in 1975and has since built more than 200,000 houses and provided shelter more than 1,000,000 people in over 3,000 communities worldwide (Habitat for Humanity, 2007).

Government - IRS

Public sectors deal with more decision makers than private sectors. Public sectors deal with more stakeholders, more people overseeing policies, strategies, and funding; and more difficulty to determine returns on investments. Public sectors were at one time under the Federal Quality Institute, which was reassigned to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) effective September 30, 1995 (Office of Personnel Management, 1995).

OPM's responsibilities to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) include imparting quality principles to federal managers and employees and enhancing the IRS agency's quality-management