Quality Management in the Air Force Quality management is an approach to business that attempts to attain continuous improvement through organizational wide efforts based on facts and data. Another focus of quality management is on processes on meeting the customer’s needs, both internal and external. Although quality management has been found in the private sector as an effort to remain competitive and profitable, over the last 30 years the federal government has been attempting to implement quality management into their organizations to handle with budget restrictions and better serve the public. More specifically, in the case of this paper, the U.S. Air Force has embedded quality management into its units. In this paper I will look
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Thanks to industries directly supporting the war effort, 17 million new civilian jobs were created and industrial productivity increased by 96 percent (Goodwin, 2001). A large amount of aircraft, tanks, rifles, ammunition, and other war materials were produced in the short time of seven years, between 1939 and 1945. With this short period of massive production, "60 percent of aircraft destined for the Far East proved unserviceable; 50 percent of electronic devices failed while still in storage; the service life of electronic devices used in bombers was a mere 20 hours; and 70 percent of naval electronic devices failed" (Even & Lindsey, 2007, p. 589). This is evidence that the U.S. certainly had poor quality management at that time but never the less, the U.S. prospered after WWII. After the war, all of the major industrial countries were damaged due to the war. The U.S. however, was untouched by war and found itself as the world powerhouse in production with a world market willing to buy whatever the U.S. produced. With an "unparalleled demand and no competition" (Walton, 1988, p. 8), the U.S. had little concern for waste and …show more content…
In the end, the Air Force did not get total quality: it got partial quality (PQ)” (Rinehart,2001, para. 10). Beginning of the new century, the Air Force shifted their quality management mindset by introducing “Performance Management”. The Air Force Chief of Staff at the time, Gen. Michael E. Ryan said “If we perform our assigned mission tasks with excellence and improve that performance in a measurable way, we are operationalizing quality,” (Spaits, 2000, para. 2). As mentioned above, there were limited factors with TQM. The new Performance Management program “provides clear guidance on refocusing our improvement efforts on getting results rather than prescribing the process.” (Spaits, 2000, para. 5). The essence of the program is as units perform their mission, the tasks are measured for effectiveness and efficiency, then assessed for improvement or modification (Spaits, 2000). Implementing the Performance Management program was an effort to simplify the quality management process from the TQM processes. To help the Air Force get started with this new program, Air Force Instruction 90-1102, Performance Management, was created and focuses on how mission-essential tasks are accomplished. According to the instruction, “There are three main steps in the Performance Management cycle: Plan, Do, and Assess.” (Performance Management, 2000, para.
Thanks to industries directly supporting the war effort, 17 million new civilian jobs were created and industrial productivity increased by 96 percent (Goodwin, 2001). A large amount of aircraft, tanks, rifles, ammunition, and other war materials were produced in the short time of seven years, between 1939 and 1945. With this short period of massive production, "60 percent of aircraft destined for the Far East proved unserviceable; 50 percent of electronic devices failed while still in storage; the service life of electronic devices used in bombers was a mere 20 hours; and 70 percent of naval electronic devices failed" (Even & Lindsey, 2007, p. 589). This is evidence that the U.S. certainly had poor quality management at that time but never the less, the U.S. prospered after WWII. After the war, all of the major industrial countries were damaged due to the war. The U.S. however, was untouched by war and found itself as the world powerhouse in production with a world market willing to buy whatever the U.S. produced. With an "unparalleled demand and no competition" (Walton, 1988, p. 8), the U.S. had little concern for waste and …show more content…
In the end, the Air Force did not get total quality: it got partial quality (PQ)” (Rinehart,2001, para. 10). Beginning of the new century, the Air Force shifted their quality management mindset by introducing “Performance Management”. The Air Force Chief of Staff at the time, Gen. Michael E. Ryan said “If we perform our assigned mission tasks with excellence and improve that performance in a measurable way, we are operationalizing quality,” (Spaits, 2000, para. 2). As mentioned above, there were limited factors with TQM. The new Performance Management program “provides clear guidance on refocusing our improvement efforts on getting results rather than prescribing the process.” (Spaits, 2000, para. 5). The essence of the program is as units perform their mission, the tasks are measured for effectiveness and efficiency, then assessed for improvement or modification (Spaits, 2000). Implementing the Performance Management program was an effort to simplify the quality management process from the TQM processes. To help the Air Force get started with this new program, Air Force Instruction 90-1102, Performance Management, was created and focuses on how mission-essential tasks are accomplished. According to the instruction, “There are three main steps in the Performance Management cycle: Plan, Do, and Assess.” (Performance Management, 2000, para.