Ritz-Carlton

After reading “A Note on Quality:  The Views of Deming, Juran, and Crosby”, address the following issue.  (Note, you may want to draw on any and all content covered up to this point in the course, as well as your own personal experiences, in developing your response.)

* Referring back to the Ritz-Carlton hotel case, do you think McBride should lengthen the 7 day countdown?  As an alternative, should McBride consider a total overhaul of the hotel opening process? Justify your response with attention to and counter-argument for alternative viewpoints.

When Patrick Mene joined The Ritz-Carlton in 1990 as the chief quality officer, the Ritz continued to maintain a heavy emphasis on human resources, but TQM philosophy began to permeate the organization. Mene focused on measures including the cost of poor quality, continuous improvement, quality planning, benchmarking, supplier certification, and quality audits. The TQM philosophy was used to implement The Seven Day Countdown. The Seven Day Countdown introduced standardization of the hotel-opening process. The Seven Day Countdown is a worldwide best practice for Ritz-Carlton. One of the pitfalls of the Seven Day Countdown, was that it limited the hotel’s ability to open at a higher occupancy rate. It was difficult to train new hires to meet the high expectations of the Ritz-Carlton service standards in only seven days. Should Ritz-Carlton change the Seven Day Countdown process? Is it possible to achieve a higher quality service at Ritz-Carlton with TQM in just seven days?

There are several aspects of quality in the service industry that differ from manufacturing firms. These differences affect how TQM is implemented in the service industry. Service industry is intangible, which makes quality hard to measure. It is difficult to control the quality of a product that cannot be tested and controlled before delivery. In manufacturing, a defective product can be replaced, but in the service industry a...