Introduction
The term quality can be defined as the conformance to set specification or meeting and exceeding customer satisfaction. Quality control plays an imperative role in the process of improving any production or service industry. Providing quality services is one of the major competitive priorities in the hospitality industry. Quality management entails the improvement of the operations and other areas of a given industry so as to satisfy the customer’s needs, ensure that the employees are empowered, increase the profitability of the organization and ensure that the organization gains and maintains a competitive advantage among over its rivals
Radisson Blu hotel, Dubai deira creek hotel is situated in Dubai (Radisson Blu, 2012). The hotel is part of a Radisson Blu & resort hotels which is also a part of the Rezidor hotel groups. The hotel chain currently operates more than 230 hotels all over the world. The hotel offers first class hotel services so as to ensure that their customers get 100% satisfaction from their services. The hotel is privately owned and is striving to establish a brand as the world leading global hotel group. The company service philosophy is “yes I can” and it offers first class, full service and amenities geared towards 100% customer satisfaction. The hotel management believes that a strong brand can only emerge if it capitalizes on customer satisfaction. The hotel has a two tiered branding that offers upscale hospitality at Radisson Blu hotels as well as high scales experience at the Radisson hotels. As of 2012, the hotel chain had 419 worldwide hotel with 94372 rooms and 108 hotels. The hotel group is also in the process of developing other hotels and restaurant (Radisson Hotel group, 2012).
Background Information
Quality Management
Quality can be defined as the ability to satisfy customer’s needs. Services must be tailor made so as to meet the customer’s needs and wants. Quality management on the other hand is the process through which the organizational structure, process and procedures are set up to ensure that the company’s directions and intentions on quality are met. The main principles of quality management are customer focus, leadership, empowering of the employees, process approach, system approach, continuous improvement, involving stakeholders during the decision making process and, maintaining good relations with these suppliers. As part of the quality assurance practices, organizations strive to become quality compliant through ISO certification and other standardizing bodies.
Successful implementation of quality control and assurance has many benefits to an organization. These benefits include:
- Ensuring customer satisfaction
- Improvement of the organizational efficiency
- Effective service delivery
- Reducing process and service waste
- Ensuing that the business is well organized and planned
- Improving the credibility of the business
- Ensuring that the business compete on equal basis
Total Quality Management
Total quality management is the process through which an organization’s process, products and services are managed and continually improved with the sole purpose of satisfying the customer’s needs. TQM advocates for optimization and integration of all the organization processes into a continuous improvement process. The main objectives of TQM are:
- Process improvement
- Reduction in defects
- Giving priority to efforts
- Determining the system capacity
- Indentifying causes of problems through the development of cause effect relationships
- Developing an improvement checklist
- Teamwork
- Ranking quality issues so as to prioritize on the most important needs
Principles of TQM
- Top level management: TQM advocates that the top level management must be the driving force towards quality improvement. The management must create an environment that allows for the quality upgrading.
- Training of workers: TQM advocates for employees training so as to make them conversant with quality needs and methods of improving quality. It is also important to train and empower employees so that their abilities are fully utilized.
- Customer focus: The main endeavor for improving the quality of products and services is to satisfy customer’s utility needs. Quality improvement must focus on the consumer as he is the final resource user. It is therefore necessary that questionnaires, consumer surveys, and feedback forums be administered so as to get information from customers and make the necessary quality improvements.
- Employee satisfaction: TQM advocates that employees play an imperative role in the process of quality improvement. It is therefore necessary that employees be trained and motivated to initiate the requisite quality improvement practices.
- Corporate culture: For a company to succeed in its quest for quality improvement, it must strive to improve its corporate culture. Organization culture inculcates good practices to the management and employees.
- Continuous improvement: quality improvement process is not a onetime event; it should be continuous and geared towards customer satisfaction. It entails identifying quality issues and looking for ways of resolving these issues.
Other areas that TQM revolves about are, effective communication, improving supplier relationship, effective formulation of vision, mission and goals, identification of tools and techniques that can be used for improvement, teamwork, trust and continuous improvement.
Evaluation Of Radisson Blu, Dubai Deira Creek
The Radisson Blu Hotel is committed to satisfying their customers. The hotel guarantees 100% satisfaction to their customers. The hotel is not certified by the relevant quality standardizing bodies such as ISO and hence, it has not attained high quality levels in all areas such as employee’s satisfaction. However, other Radisson blu hotels are certified and are in the process of continually improving their operations. It is therefore imperative that the hotel strives to attain better practices for it to improve its services. This will entail the implementation of Total quality management practices the hotel.
Strategies to improve quality at radisson blu dubai deira creek
The main areas that the hotel should embark on in order to improve the quality of their services to customers include:
Formulation of Vision and mission statement
The hotel chain must formulate an appropriate vision and mission that will inculcate the hotel chain objectives and other values that they hold to the employees. Objectives such as profit maximization, customer satisfaction and employee empowerment should be ingrained in the company vision and mission statement.
Benchmarking all the hospitality function
The hotel management should identify the best practices in the hospitality industry. These practices can be obtained from the evaluating other leading hotels as well as observing the current trends in the industry. After this evaluation, the hotel can establish these as the best practices and use them as a standard to which they can compare their own services. Through benchmarking, the hotel will be able to establish areas that need improvement.
Enhancing the procurement process
One of the ways through which the hotel group can improve on quality is by enhancing the procurement process. For the hotel to be effective, the suppliers must supply products such as the food, décor and other raw materials consumed in the hotel as well as other services at the right time, quality and within the set specifications. It is therefore necessary that the hotel management group develops strategies to continuously improve the supply chain. The main strategies that the hotel management group can use to improve their supply chains management are:
Select the most experienced and reputable supplier
The hotel management should select the best suppliers based on the quality of their products, the time taken to deliver the raw materials and the cost. The best suppliers must be able to deliver the right quantity of materials at the right time and at the prevailing market costs.
Linking sales, finance and operation
It is important that the sales, finance and operation department operate as a team. The sales and operation department can be able to forecast the demand of raw materials based on the number of customers they expect. This will enable the procurement department to order the raw materials on time.
Monitoring supplier’s performance
The hotel management team should ensure that all the suppliers are carefully monitored to ensure that there is a continuous improvement in the procurement process. Continuous monitoring will ensures that the best suppliers are selected.
Training the procurement team
The procurement team should be trained on the best procurement method. The hotel can use online procurement techniques so as to enhance the supply chain.
Employee training and empowerment
One of the TQM principles entails the training of the employees. The hotel chain should continually train their employee. The training should be carried out so as to enhance every employee area of specialization. For example, waiters should be trained on how to handle customer while the managers should be trained on new and better management techniques. Other than training, the employee’s talents and abilities should be recognized and enhanced. Hard working employees should be recognized and rewarded through awarding of gifts, money rewards and job promotions. The management should review the salaries and remuneration of all the hotel employees after every year. This will enable them develop as the hotel chain grows. Through these practices, the hotel will attract and retain competent and experienced employees.
Teamwork
In addition to the continuous training, the employee and the management will be trained on team working and team building. This will enable the employee to work together in order to achieve the hotel vision and mission.
Regular Quality audit
The hotel should audit all there process so as to check the quality of their services against the benchmarked or best practices that are supported by the hotel industry. These quality audits should be done once every six months. Areas that require improvement will be identified and improvement instituted. The process will be continuous so that the quality improvement process will also continue.
Improving the Corporate culture
Corporate culture refers to the beliefs, values and practices adopted by a given organization. It is imperative that the hotel chain inculcate a good corporate culture as this affect the quality of their services as well as their long term profitability. The hotel can train and empower workers, improve communication between the employees and the management, adopt new innovative ideas and services and encourage teamwork.
Implementation of TQM
The following procedure will be used to implement the total quality management system to the hotel chain:
Top level management
The first step will entail holding meetings with the top level management. Through these meetings, the top management will commit themselves to the continuously improve their services. Implementation of TQM requires that the management provide guidance and financial support. The managers must plan, perform the stipulated task, review the progress and make any changes (Khurram, 2010).
Training
The second stage will be training the employees and the management on TQM process. The main training includes: TQM principles, teambuilding and teamwork, quality standards and certification among others. These training will enable the employee identify areas that require improvement, work together as a team in the process of determining the best solution to the indentified quality issue, institute the necessary changes and monitor the improvement.
Development of a quality department
The hotel will then constitute a quality control department that will handle all quality issues within the hotel. The team will be headed by a manager who is knowledgeable on quality issues.
Identification of the main quality issues
After training the management team will be charged with the responsibility of identifying quality issues within the hotel. This will be a continuous process that will involve the identification and solving of all the quality issues that arise. To enhance this process, the quality management team will form a team with members from all department so as to discus quality issues.
Conducting Customer survey
The hotel groups will regularly issues a small questionnaire to their customers. This questionnaire will be filled by those customers checking out of the hotel. Through this questionnaire, the customers will be asked to identify areas where the hotel can make improvement. The questionnaire will also enable the quality manager identify customer wants and services that they may want improved. This process will ensure that quality improvement process takes into account the customer views and recommendations.
Formulating solutions
After identification quality issues, methods of solving these problems will be formulated. During the formulation of these solutions, the quality management team and two employees from the affected department will be engaged. This will ensure that teamwork is encouraged and that the whole organization participates in the process of improving quality. Various solutions will be determined and the best solution adapted.
Implementation of the solutions
The proposed solutions to the quality issues will be implemented. The quality management department will monitor the implementation process to ensure that the area that has been indentified improves significantly.
Evaluation of the quality
TQM focuses on the improvement of quality, customer satisfaction and employee empowerment. It is imperative that these areas continually develop for the hotel to achieve high quality standards and also attract and retaining customers. The proposed strategies will be monitored and evaluated using the following methods;
Evaluating employee
The employees will be administered with a questionnaire after every six months. This questionnaire will address various issues affecting the hotel workforce. Through this questionnaire, it will be possible to evaluate the progress of the company in terms employee satisfactions.
Monitoring sales and profits
Improvement of quality definitely results to increased sales and profits. The financial records of the hotel will be checked to ensure that the sales and profits increase.
Customer evaluation
It is imperative for the hotel to collect views of the customers. This will be done through the issuing a short questionnaire to the customers. The customers will be asked to rate all the services provided by the hotel. Also the customers will also be asked to suggest some improvement that can be done. The customers will be encouraged to give their feedback and discussion on the social media. Through these channels, the hotel management will collect, analyze and determine the level of customer satisfaction and make any necessary improvement.
Challenges to the Implementation of TQM
During the implementation of the TQM process, the following challenges are likely to result
Maintaining quality
The management and the quality control team must ensure that the qualities of the services are met at all the time. This is sometimes difficult as it is not easy to quantify the level of satisfaction a customer gets from a given service. The only way is to develop a scale where customers can rate the hotel services as either very poor, poor, average, good and, very good.
Costs
TQM advocates for constant training of the employees and this may be expensive to the hotel. Also, during training, the employee will not be engaged in their duties and this may necessitate the hotel to employ more people.
Teamwork: to ensure that the hotel is successful, all the workers must operate as a team. The process of formulating a good working team is challenging and one has to ensure that abilities of these workers are used to the maximum.
References
Khurram, H. (2010). Introduction and Implementation of Total Quality Management (TQM). Web.
Radisson Hotel Chain. (2012). Radissom facts: Hotels that love to say yes. Web.
Radisson Blu. (2012). Radisson BLU, Dubai Deira Creek website. Web.