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Essays on principles of quality management
Quality management chapter 1
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Azalea Seafood Gumbo Shoppe
Introduction
Found in approximately 1000 supermarkets and 300 restaurants, Azalea Seafood and Gumbo Shoppe is among the largest producers of ready-to-eat gumbo with annual revenues in 2000 of more than $1 million. The company's gumbo was their best selling item earning nearly 90% of yearly sales. Although Azalea has a competitive advantage with its tasty gumbo, Azalea is looking to maintain long-term growth and obtain a sustainable competitive advantage. In order increase its profitability, the company needs to consider options to improve its business strategies.
Currently Azalea's facilities are located in a small country side building and many large restaurants do not find it at par with their standards. This causes Azalea to lose sales from businesses like Applebee?s and Cracker Barrel. In addition, major highways for the rapid distribution of their product are not available and easily accessible. Despite the location, Azalea?s owners are satisfied with the new facility and its improved capabilities, compared to that of their old location.
In order to increase sales by 50% and help Azalea to obtain a sustainable competitive advantage, the company needs to develop four strategic plans. The first one includes staying in their current location. Staying at this location will maintain their satisfaction with the facility and allow them to maximize their efficiency. Next, Azalea should implement a Total Quality Management (...
The fast food restaurant industry, which includes quick-service and fast-casual restaurants, is highly segmented with the top 50 companies accounting for only 25% of the industry’s sales. The $120 billion industry includes over 200,000 restaurants with 50% of those specializing in hamburger entrees. (hoovers.com 2008) The major competitors in the industry include McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, Subway, and KFC – Chick-fil-A’s major competitor in chicken sales. Chick-fil-A’s unique position in the market, specializing in chicken-based entrées, has lead to a competitive advantage which the company has been able to capitalize on. Recently, many competitors have added chicken entrees in order to compete in the market segment. Through marketing strategies and company initiatives, Chick-fil-A has tried to stay distant from competitors, offering a fresh alternative to the ordinary fast food restaurant.
Strategic planning is crucial for the success of all business endeavors. Analyzing currents trends in technology, consumer markets, competition, and the workforce can play a pivotal part in whether or not the organization can survive. Overtime, strategic planning strategies must be modified in order to compensate for changes in the industry. Goals and strategic planning often necessitate change to ensure that the organization is performing at peak level, while offering the most beneficial and quality services to consumers.
When the Challenger shuttle was set to launch NASA was feeling political pressure to gain congressional support for the space program, to help gain this support the shuttle crew had a high school teacher on board, Christa McAuliffe, and millions of people were excited and tuned into watch. NASA officials were hoping that this new endeavor would help generate funding since the U.S. budget deficit was soaring and they were afraid that their budget could be cut. Technical failure was the reason the shuttle exploding after take-off but this was not the only reason. With pressure mounting, decisions made by NASA and Morton Thiokol Corporation, the contractor who manufactured the piece with the technical failure, put political agendas in front of the technical decisions, which resulted in the tragedy (Bolman & Deal, 2008).
The Goal is a book that has an immense support on improvement, which will undoubtedly encourage the Total Quality Management terminology when trying to built up and improve their productivity. However, the Theory of Constraints also plays a very important role in this book, because it guide us to not only focus on the improvements of the business as a whole, but also to focus intensively on the constrains, “ Herbies”, or bottlenecks.
Popularity of the Mona Lisa is perhaps tenuous because a psychological mechanism recognized as the “mere-exposure effect” has likely played a role in shaping cultural preference for paintings. According to Prof. Cutting from Cornell University, students are grown to like the paintings which they have seen more in experiments, and thus even unconscious familiarity breeds affection (Intelligent Life). The scientific experiment offers a clue as to how canons are formed. In the history, the preferences of wealthy and influential collectors bestowed prestige on certain works, which made the works more likely to be hung in galleries and printed in anthologies. “Scholars”, Cutting argues, “are no different from the public in the effects of mere
Our commitment to steady, long-term improvement in our products and processes is the cornerstone of our business strategy. To achieve this objective, we must work to continuously improve the overall quality of our design, manufacturing, administrative, and support organizations.
Demand for Panera franchising opportunities was very high, which allowed Panera to be picky about where and with whom they would do business. Panera determined where bakery-café locations could be. The franchisees bore the cost of opening new locations, and were required to obtain their ingredients from the home company. Expansion using the franchise model provided many upside benefits for Panera, while limiting the downside r...
Azalea Seafood Gumbo Shoppe wishes to develop a strategic plan to maintain long-term growth and sustain a competitive advantage. For Azalea to accomplish this, they will need to consider the options presented here. Included is an analysis of Azalea's problems and issues to address, along with recommendations to grow the business. The recommendations are based on the status of the current market and forces that drive the industry.
“It never fails, we walk in a room, Nobody sees me, they’re all lookin’ at you, I disappear but that’s fine with me, I feel the same way, you’re all I can see, Now they’ve written books about da Vinci’s muse, Now I know it wasn’t but it shoulda been you” (Paisley, The Mona Lisa). He wishes that she was the woman in the painting so everyone could see her beauty forever. Even though he did not paint a portrait of her he did write a song that would let the world know forever just how beautiful he found her to be. Whether this was his original plan or not he found a way to have the world know of her beauty for all eternity just like his fellow
... NASA (The Challenger and Columbia Shuttle Disaster). First we looked at the images of managing change used by NASA in the case study. Then we discussed the types of change(s) NASA under took. Next we looked at some of the challenges of change that NASA faced. Next we discussed some of the resistance to change that NASA dealt with. Then we looked at how NASA implemented change. Next we discussed vision and change and the impact in the case study. Finally we discussed sustaining change as it related to the changes implemented by NASA in the case study.
Technology has changed the world for today’s teens, and not all for the better. According to the U.S Department of Health and Human Services, cyberbullying can happen twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, and reach a kid even when he or she is alone. By definition cyberbullying is “willful and repeated harm inflicted through the median of electronic text” (Deuck). This happens in many ways shapes and forms. The use of information and communication technologies such as e-mails, cell phones, pagers, text messages, instant messaging, and defamatory online personal polling web sites has became common among teens. As a result of cyberbullying, victims suffer from emotional harm, loss of self- esteem, and experience physical harm.
Every organization uses different business strategies in order to remain in business. Some adopt customer- centric strategies; some uses strategies to maximize their profit. For a long time, many organizations have made quality as their selling point.
The main challenge is to determine how Panera Bread can continue to achieve high growth rates in the future. Panera Bread is operating in an extremely high competitive restaurant market which forces the company to improve and to grow steadily for staying profitable. The company’s mission statement of putting “a loaf of bread in every arm” is just underlying Panera’s commitment for growing. They are now in a good financial situation and facing growth rates of up to 20% per year in a niche market that has a great growth potential. In the next 7 years the fast-casual market is expected to grow by 500% in sales to a total of $30 billion.
Cyberbullying is simply the use of technology and its accessible tools to harass, hurt and embarrass the targeted individual repeatedly. Stopcyberbullying.org (n.d.), a dedicated organization to prevent cyberbullying and promote awareness, has defined cyberbullying as the use of the internet and mobile devices or digital technology such as text or instant messaging, e-mail, and/or post blogging by adolescents or teens to repeatedly threaten, harass, embarrass, torment, humiliate, or likewise the targeted adolescent(s) or teen(s). The 21st century has promoted and forced our teens to become very knowledgeable with the use of technology in addition to social media use and access. The array of social media medium includes Twitter, Facebook, and the even low-key Formspring—a medium that offers “total anonymity” to users (Holladay, 2011, p. 5). Even though ...
Leonardo is one of the few people who has the ability to make these qualities seem so perfect under his hands. His artworks are by far the most popular pieces of art that are in museums to this day. Recently a popular painting “Salvator Mundi”, painted between 1490-1500, has been placed up for auction and is estimated that the painting will sale for at least $100 million. This is just one of 16 surviving paintings that have made it through the years and it’s not even the most popular one. The Mona Lisa is the most popular painting by anyone to this very day. It was painted in the year 1503 and is famous for multiple reasons. One being that da Vinci didn’t just paint this ordinarily, but in a technique called sfumato and it was painted in atmospheric perspective as seen in the background. The technique sfumato is the blending of oil paints to blur the lines between colors. Atmospheric perspective was a new painting style where things far away in paintings looked blurry and this style was used in the background of the Mona Lisa. The word mysterious is associated with this painting and others that have come from his works. The smile that is presented in the Mona Lisa is somewhat puzzling in its own way and the person depicted in the painting is still not 100% known to experts to this day. The eyes that are on the Mona Lisa seem to watch and follow you when you look at the painting. One of the weird myths that