QUALITY MANAGEMENT

Quality Management

Quality Management

Compare and Contrast Quality Management Of Two Organizations: HP and DELL

The scope of the paper is to compare the practices followed in two companies, “Hewlett-Packard” and “Dell Computers”, and the reasons for their quality management. The comparison is done on the basis of structure, technology, culture, fit with the environment.

Quality Management of HP and DELL: Compare and contrast

HP used direct sales force to market the products and adopted a holistic marketing approach creating cross functional teams with people from R&D, manufacturing and marketing to work on products like DeskJet printers etc (Michael and Catherine, 2006, 121-185). the company philosophy was to respect competitors and marketing people were supposed to take the customer's side with no compulsion to agree to what the HP management says. Dell relied heavily on small teams with maximum emphasis on personal communication as well as electronic communication which was done through e-mails and shared electronic dashboards, in intranet. They shared the success stories to boast the people (Carroll, 2005, 475). This case had happened when they entered “Servers” business; since marketing people were skeptical about the product, the organization shared the success stories of its marketing people, spread all over the globe, through electronic news letter's (David, 2006, 110-125).

HP adopted a 'quality circle' approach whereby all the departments in the organization were driven by 'quality' mantra and coupled with an open environment it created a perfect combination. People, if they found defects in the product during any stage, could directly communicate to concerned authorities without going through complicated procedures. Even though Dell adopted 'quality circle' approach, it coupled the quality mantra with excellent customer service. Since consumers are buying the products directly without even touching and seeing the product, they can only increase the customer and brand equities through excellent customer service. ...