The Evolution Of Quality At Xerox Research Assignment (Essay Sample)

THE EVOLUTION OF QUALITY AT XEROX
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The Evolution of Quality at Xerox
The Xerox Crisis
This dates back in the earlier 1950s up to the end of 1970s, where Xerox dominated the market by being the only one in the copier industry. The products from Xerox exhibited an excellent rating since their performance was of high-quality making dominate the market. The fall of Xerox started when IBM and Kodak joined the industry in the early 1980s, which later on, the share for Xerox had to reduce by 50% regarding the market share in which the company was once the dominant player (Evans & Lindsay, 2016 p.31). The enterprises that emerged to compete with Xerox had to keenly focus on quality and production of low volume copiers while Xerox remained practicing its previous business process. This made Xerox have a lot of rework, product inspection, a lot of wastage and scrap, customer product returns and many more defaulters that affected the competition.
IBM and Kodak, who were the main emerging competitors of Xerox focused much on quality and production. This aspect made Xerox lag behind compared to its competitors, who majored on the larger workforce, addressed the manufacturing problems, had a larger number of suppliers unlike Xerox with complex and redundant business processes that affected it with high chances of ceasing the operations (Evans & Lindsay, 2016 p.31). Therefore, Xerox had to think of the immediate action to be taken to regain its smooth operations and ensure continuity and competition while being once the leading in the copier in the industry. This was meant to prevent Xerox from closing its operations.
Performance Excellence Turnaround Strategy
David T Kearns, the president of Xerox came up with a strategy known as leadership through quality, which focused on quality issues. This strategy had to address the issues of management problems based on manufacturing defects, the tendency of the customers returning the products, processes involved during manufacturing, the number of suppliers and others. This philosophy was formed while basing on the statement that, every employee is liable for quality management and improvement. This has to extend its responsibilities to both internal and external customers and to link the clients with the culture of Xerox (Evans & Lindsay, 2016). Furthermore, Xerox had to employ the aspect of benchmarking on the best practices in and outside the company. This was followed by a dangerous of activities including both team formation and teamwork. Their experts worked tirelessly on total quality management policy which was meant to improve the performance of the organization for the realization of its success to be continued (Charantimath, 2012).
After Xerox had encountered some problems in their business, the focus shifted on feedback process. They also got involved in mail surveys and internal customer through training and program development of the employees on the business and the business processes incurred (Evans, & Lindsay, 2016). Xerox took an approach of reviewing, reorienting and implementation of the newly adopted processes which are aimed at formulating and implementation of the set goals and objectives for various business units. It also had to work smart on the increment of customer focus, product, job planning, and distribution through going to market network. Product delivery to the market was also a major concern for the company since this issue affected both the company and the customers.
In the end, Xerox worked hard and managed to review and improve the supplier relationship. The process was so immense since the focus was too much on just in time production as well as solving the issue of employee relations, rewards and enacting recognition programs. This relation was to focus much on the gap between the management and the staff. According to Evans and Lindsay (2016), the initiatives taken by Xerox to curb the situation of rejection had drastically reduced the rejection rate of the default parts from 10,000 to 300 parts per million during the production time in the assembly line. This initiative also eliminated the need for inspecting suppliers’ parts and cost reduction by 45%. The overall manufacturing costs also reduced by 20%, the number of vendors reduced from 5000 to 500, and there was improved product quality to 93% (Evans & Lindsay, 2016).
In the late 1990s and early 2000s after the revitalization on the implementation of leadership by quality, Xerox adopted and started using the system of six sigma quality improvement strategy which was a drive of performance...