Lyndsey Brown BUSN 6110-OPM Jeff Seward 4/11/11 Nestl: Quality on the Boardroom Agenda How should top

management go about managing quality? Benchmarking can always prove to be a successful technique in Quality Management. The process allows an organization to rank itself among its competitors and develop ways to improve and monitor production. Managing quality of an organizations product should always be priority, especially in a product focused facility. Nestl should maintain the acceptable specification range and determine how the manufacturing process can be modified to improve that range to always meet and attempt to exceed the promise they make to their consumer. How could Nestl quickly respond to a major quality challenge? Taking immediate and necessary precautions and action is the only method to mitigate a negative perception of quality assumed by consumers due to products not meeting Nestls quality standards. Any products assumed to be an exception to the mean should immediately be withdrawn and destroyed. Delays in action can become costly for a manufacturing company. A safer operational decision would be to announce the variance publicly, pull the product, potentially reimburse consumers, and then provide the necessary research to determine the cause of the exception. This method may prove to be expensive however, losing current or potential consumers could prove more costly. Abiding by the concept act now, think later, describes the best plan of action for any Quality Management Team. When an incident occurs it should be the priority of the organization to communicate the issue, further necessary information, and the Companys Plan of Action to all employees within the organization. Ensuing the internal communication is the obvious public communication. Nestl should never avoid the press but instead take full responsibility. Avoiding the press would allow them to imply their own reasoning for the poor product quality which would directly affect the market view on the Companys product. Nestl had had a strict quality system in place for some time, but was such a system the answer? Quality systems can become quite costly and therefore when budget cuts or production cuts are necessary these systems are often affected. However in operations, one of the most important duties is to provide healthy, safe and quality products to the consumers. Lower-quality products result in higher production costs and also could lead to implications similar to those outlined in the Case Study. As a matter of ethics, Nestl could never be too strict. What alternatives or modifications would be needed to ensure the responsiveness of such a system? To achieve the goals of their organization, Nestl managers must first understand the logic and consider all available data and possible alternatives to a decision. Due to the uncertainty to which state of nature in a decision environment may occur the organization needs to rely on maximizing the outcome for every alternative, maximizing the minimum outcome, and lastly, to assume that any occurrence is likely

Lyndsey Brown BUSN 6110-OPM Jeff Seward 4/11/11 to occur. Everyone in the organization needs to be trained in the techniques of Total Quality Management in an effort to plan and prepare for the maximum, minimum and most likely events to occur.