PRODUCTION/OPERATIONS MANAGEMENTKEONG LEONG, Feature Editor, Fisher
College of Business, QUALITY MANAGEMENT AND CORPORATE PARTNERSHIPS AT THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITYby David A. Collier, College of Business, The Ohio State University Ford Motor Company and The Ohio State University entered into a Total Quality Business and Education Partnership (TQBEP) in 1994. The TQBEP concept was founded by Robert W. Galvin, CEO of Motorola during the third annual Total Quality Forum meeting in 1991. The objective of these partnerships is to encourage colleges and universities to integrate Total Quality into their curricula and to research and practice Total Quality. The concept quickly spread and today there are 19 companies and 36 universities participating in a TQBEP arrangement. The Ford/Ohio State Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) Partnership was officially started by 120 Ohio State faculty and senior administrators attending a three-day Ford/OSU CQI Symposium in Dearborn, Michigan, during September 1994. Ohio State University President Gordon Gee and Ford CEO Alex Trotman began the symposium. Dr. George Box, Director of Research, University of Wisconsin, provided a lively seminar on why universities need to change and the scientific basis for total quality improvement. Dr. Myron Tribus, Former Director-MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Study, discussed how to apply CQI in the classroom. Other symposium sessions included voice of the customer panels from recruiters and Ohio State alumni, and breakout sessions by Ford Motor Company managers on topics such as cross functional teams, visioning and alignment of objectives, process improvement, and the theory of constraints. The Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University set up a Ford/OSU CQI College Steering Committee with over twenty members, chaired by Professor David A. Collier, and began to define CQI initiatives. The general approaches used by the college for these CQI initiatives are (1) College-Wide CQI Initiatives, (2) Program Initiatives, and (3) Affinity Group Initiatives. College-wide initiatives (top-down) are broad in scope and best coordinated and supported directly by the dean's office. Program initiatives focus on the Ph.D., MBA, and undergraduate programs. CQI program initiatives are coordinated with faculty program chairs, and typically are interdisciplinary improvement efforts. Affinity group initiatives are interest groups who define a CQI initiative themselves (a bottom-up approach) and ask for support, if needed, from the CQI College Steering Committee, and sometimes program chairs and the dean's office. Several college faculty and administrative affinity groups have on-going CQI projects. In the Fisher College of Business, a new interdisciplinary MBA quality management area of emphasis includes courses on (1) Quality Management, (2) Service/ Quality Management, and (3) Managing High Performance Organizations. The Quality Management course uses student teams to study quality problems and emphasizes statistical quality control, quality costs, robust design, and provides an overview of Deming, Juran and Crosby's ideas. Quality improvement teams make class presentations and students also evaluate other team presentations. The Service/Quality Management course uses many cases and the book, The Service/Quality Solution as its primary teaching materials. Typical topics include consumer benefit package design and strategy, service process reengineering, waiting line models, Baldrige Award, service encounter management, service/quality measurement and interlinking. The entire course is built around the idea that everything in the organization exists to support service encounter design and execution. A final course project requires students to analyze a service business using the following three-level framework: (1) Consumer Benefit Package Management, (2) Service Delivery System Design, and (3) Service Encounter Management. The Managing High Performance Organizations course emphasizes the shift from traditional functional organizational structures to networked organizations with self-managing and self-directed teams. Topics such as leadership, organizational design and structures, recognition and reward systems, team management, and empowerment are the focus of this course. A fourth course on Decision and Data Analysis (customer needs and wants analysis, voice of the customer, survey design, etc.) offered by the marketing faculty, and a module on activity-based-costing taught by the accounting faculty are proposed for the future. Therefore, within the Fisher College of Business, the faculties of Management Sciences, Marketing, Human Resource Management, and Accounting will eventually participate in the Quality Management course workþa truly interdisciplinary area of emphasis. Longer term, the Ohio State Colleges of Agriculture, Education, Engineering, and Medicine, and the School of Public Policy and Management, and the Department of Aviation have all expressed interest in their students taking the quality management course work. The quality movement has hit all areas of U.S. society as reflected by these university and student interest groups. Quality management is a great rationale and umbrella for interdisciplinary work within each college and across colleges. It serves as a catalyst for joint teaching and research initiatives. In the research arena, for example, two operations management Ph.D. students are doing dissertations on quality related topicsþone in health care and the other in manufacturing. Another noticeable change, even in a large public university, is faculty and administrators are beginning to define who are the university's customers and what are their wants and needs. Voice of customer panels seem to have made a big impact here. The Ford Motor Company/Ohio State University Total Quality Business and Education Partnership helped establish and legitimize CQI initiatives within the university community.
David A. Collier is a member of the Faculty of Management Science, College of Business, The Ohio State University. He is the author of three books on service management and quality management: Service Management: The Automation of Services, Service Management: Operating Decisions, and The Service/Quality Solution: Using Service Management to Gain Competitive Advantage. He is the recipient of several awards for outstanding journal articles, has written and published three book chapters and over forty refereed publications, and eight of his cases have been reprinted in major marketing and operations management textbooks. During May and June 1995, he will be teaching in the Executive MBA program at the University of Warwick in England and in the Masters in International Business (MIB) program at the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees University in Paris, France.
Dr. G. Keong Leong
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