Firing on All Cylinders: The Service/Quality System for High-Powered Corporate Performance
by By Clemmer, Jim and Sheehy, Barry
Category: Business & Economics , General

In a recent Gallup Poll, 50 percent of CEOs surveyed consider service/quality to be the single most important business issue their organizations face. North American businesses confront fierce competition from abroad and continue to lose market share. A growing number of companies, governments, and institutions are turning to service/quality improvement, or total quality management, to succeed in these turbulent times. But many organizations are floundering and failing to effectively implement these powerful new management methods.Firing on All Cylinders gives you a practical map for improving service and quality within your organization. You'll find thought-provoking questions that help you analyze what components are amiss within your organization so you and your management team remove quality improvement roadblocks. Jim Clemmer provides essential implementation checklists, "how-to" tips, and deployment processes so you can use Achieve International's Service/Quality System to guide your company's continuous quality improvement journey.Achieve's Service/Quality System is used by dozens of health care, public and private sector organizations, such as American Express, IBM - Canada, and Black & Decker. It combines three formerly separate organizational performance fields - customer service, organization development, and quality improvement - to help management teams take a broader, system-wide approach to long-term performance improvement.At the heart of this highly effective system are 12 key service/quality improvement areas or "cylinders" that include skill building, signaling commitment, systems and process management, standards and measures, listening to internal/external customers, reward and recognition, education and awareness, marketing strategies, and hiring and orienting. Clemmer outlines the fundamental steps for improving performance for each cylinder and incorporates a number of brief, "real-life" examples of what numerous organizations have done to achieve top performance. He also outlines how to avoid common implementation pitfalls and traps.Firing on All Cylinders also answers such fundamental deployment questions as: who should be involved?, how does your organization build the commitment of the vital frontline people who will ultimately carry out the improvement plans?, and how can you ensure that the Service/Quality System doesn't become just another "program of the month"?This comprehensive, clearly organized strategy for implementing a continuous quality improvement process will help you and your management team fine tune your organizational engine and increase performance!