Motorola Quality Implementation Case Study

“With over 50 facilities worldwide, and more than 100 000 employees, Motorola is recognized as one of the leading manufacturers of electronic equipment, systems and components in the global market place. Its products are highly regarded for their quality and reliability. However, this was not always the reputation of Motorola. (Pamela Lewis,Stephen Goodman,Patricia Fandt,Joseph Michlitsch, 2007) Customers complained about many areas of dissatisfaction such as delivery time, product quality and accuracy. Top management of Motorola realized that Motorola needed control system that could guarantee employees excellent performance and improve manufacturing outputs. Eventually, the measurement for quality, total defects per unit of work was established.

This task can be accomplished by Quality Implementation Team. The main task of Quality Implementation team is to develop an appropriate action system or plan the education of all employees and supplies. For this reason, the Motorola University was established in order to teach people how to respond quickly to new technologies, as well as teach people how to lead a department to better performance and higher quality. As a part of contribution to the quality improvement Motorola and Northwestern jointly designed a quality course for the second year of Northwester’s MBA program. Another task of the Task Implementation Team is to execute the Quality Improvement within the area of the responsibility. Benchmarking is a type of Quality Improvement and it means eliminating and avoiding implementation problems within the organization. The benchmarking in Motorola works as follow: “Who is the best person in my own field and how might I use some of their techniques and characteristics to improve my own performance in order to do the best (executive, machine operator, chef, purchasing agent, and so on) in my “class?” (Evans, 2008) The practices of many organizations demonstrate that quality improvement can enhance market position and

Motorola’s suppliers asked to rate the business practices and offer suggestions for improving. Another instrument of coordinating and controlling quality within the organization is teamwork. “A mean is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, a set of performance goals.” (Evans, 2008) The most important benefit of using teams as a way to coordinate work is that teams can react fast on changes in customer demands, which in turn quite essential for surviving in competitive environment of modern business. The great results of implementing teamwork in Motorola can be seen on the example of organized Total Customer Satisfaction competition by Motorola. The employees find this event worth remembering and reinforcing their values in the company. Generally, Motorola obtained exceptional ratings in employee safety and health, community development and environment protection programs. These ratings help Motorola's business since people want to buy products from companies that highly care about these