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K.F. Pun: K.F. Pun is a Lecturer in the Department of Manufacturing Engineering and Engineering Management, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
K.S. Chin: K.S. Chin is an Associate Professor, in the Department of Manufacturing Engineering and Engineering Management, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
Henry Lau: Henry Lau is currently Honorary Research Fellow of the Manufacturing Information Systems Research Project, Department of Manufacturing Engineering, Hong Kong.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: The authors would like to thank the laboratory management, users and customers, who have contributed their views in both stages of the Quality Strategy Deployment Study of the Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory. The authors would also like to thank Ms W.S. Ma, of the Department of Manufacturing Engineering and Engineering Management, City University of Hong Kong, for her assistance in the users' surveys and interviews and the subsequent data analysis.
1. Introduction
A consistent feature noticeable in successful organizations tends to be that short-term decisions are taken in the context of consistent, carefully thought out long-term corporate strategies. Formulation of viable quality strategies can help sustain competitive advantage and respond to the challenge of economic, technological and social changes. Many researchers and practitioners also advocate that deployment of quality strategies could help organizations deliver their quality products/services and attain their performance objectives and goals (Black et al., 1988; Donald and Ronald, 1993; Porter, 1998; Pun and Ma, 1999). This paper begins with a review on the processes of strategy development and deployment. It then discusses the identification of users'/customers' needs and the deployment of service quality in line with corporate/business/functional strategies. A pioneer study of quality strategy deployment (QSD), based on a typical engineering service organization, is described. The study integrated the quality function deployment (QFD) technique and the hoshin kanri method to generalize a feasible approach to service quality deployment. Incorporating the findings of the QSD study, a generic 13-step QFD/hoshin guideline is proposed to help service organizations develop viable strategies and deploy service quality to attain performance improvement.
2. Strategy development and service quality deployment
The literature of strategic management is replete with many variations on the definition of strategy. In military terms, "strategy" refers to the important plan. Where the objective is to defeat the enemy, the strategy will be to deploy the...