TecSmart Electronics1
TecSmart Electronics designs, manufactures, and repairs electronic power supplies for a variety
of original equipment manufacturers in the computer, medical, and office products field. The
company’s focus is summed up by three simple words: quality, service, and value. The top
management team started its quality journey in the mid-1980s, basing it on Deming’s 14 Points.
They established a Deming Steering Committee to guide the process and champion each of the
14 Points, and trained most of the employees by sending them to Deming seminars. Although the
Deming philosophy provided the foundation to carry the company into the twenty-first century,
the current CEO decided to pursue a Baldrige focus and began a process of self-assessment
against the criteria to identify opportunities for improvement.
As a first preparatory step, the executive team spent a day off site to think about its
management practices and create an initial list of its strengths, which are summarized here.
• Senior leaders set company objectives and guide cross-functional teams to review and
develop individual plans for presentation to employees. Each department manager develops a
supporting objective for each company objective, and nearly every employee works on a team to
support these objectives.
• Senior leaders participate in quarterly communication meetings with all employees to
discuss company issues and answer questions. All employees receive full financial information
from their managers each month.
• Senior leaders teach courses in TecSmart University on change management, customer
service, quality, and leadership; meet with customers, suppliers, and benchmarking partners; and
are actively engaged in professional and community organizations.
• The company collects operational data in every department and evaluates its information
requirements in monthly senior staff meetings and cross-functional task team meetings.
• TecSmart sets Six Sigma goals for most of its processes and converted process
measurements to parts per million on all product lines.
1 This case was inspired by the Zytec Application Summary, 1991 Winner of the Malcolm
Baldrige National Quality Award.
• All employees are trained in a five-step problem-solving process based on defining
problems, collecting data, analyzing the cause of the problem, developing a solution, and
implementing change.
• Inputs to the strategic planning process include customer feedback, market research, and
benchmarking information from customers, suppliers, competitors, and industry leaders. Team
analyses are evaluated at an off-site planning meeting by all managers, resulting in long-range
strategic planning documents, which are discussed with the rest of the workforce as well as
major suppliers for feasibility. Once agreed upon, department teams develop detailed action
plans with measurable goals. The CEO reviews progress every month.
• TecSmart uses more than a dozen different processes to gather customer information, and
validates the information by consolidation and cross-referencing.
• All employees receive customer relationship training. Customer service employees help
define service standards, which are tracked on a routine basis.
• All complaints are handled by the vice president of sales and resolved within two days.
The vice president is responsible for ensuring that any process that generated a complaint is
improved.
• Customer satisfaction data is acquired from sales representatives, executive phone calls
and visits, and satisfaction surveys. These data are reviewed and compared by the executive team
during the strategic planning process.
• TecSmart uses self-managed work groups in which employees make most day-to-day
decisions while managers focus on coaching and process improvement. Hourly workers can
make process changes with the agreement of only one other person, and salespeople are
authorized to travel whenever they feel it necessary for customer service.
• New product introduction teams work with design engineers and customers to ensure that
design requirements are met during manufacturing and testing. All processes are formally
documented, using statistical process control to monitor variation and provide a basis for
corrective action. Statistical methods are used to optimize processes.
• Quality is assessed through internal audits, employee opinion surveys, and customer
feedback.
• Suppliers are involved in early stages of a product development program. Quality
requirements for suppliers have been identified, and certified suppliers’ materials are exempt
from incoming inspection.
Discussion Questions
1. Discuss how the practices that TecSmart identified support Deming’s 14 Points.
2. How do these practices support the Baldrige criteria? Specifically, identify which of the
questions in the criteria each of these practices address.
3. What are some of the obvious opportunities for improvement relative to the Baldrige
criteria? What actions would you recommend that TecSmart do to improve its pursuit of
performance excellence using the Baldrige criteria?