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ACCA Strategic Professional · Strategic Business Leader · Enabling success: performance excellence

Quorn Logistics adopts a total quality management (TQM) programme. Senior managers announce quality targets and add a final inspection stage to catch defective shipments before they reach customers, but otherwise leave processes unchanged. Which feature of TQM is most clearly missing?

The missing feature is prevention of errors through continuous improvement and employee empowerment at source. TQM builds quality into every process and aims to get things right first time, whereas Quorn merely adds end-stage inspection to detect defects.

  1. AA cost leadership focus
  2. BPrevention of errors through continuous improvement and employee empowerment at sourceCorrect
  3. CUse of a balanced scorecard
  4. DOutsourcing of quality control to a third party

Explanation

TQM emphasises getting it right first time, preventing defects through continuous improvement (kaizen) and involving all staff, with quality built into processes. Adding final inspection is detection rather than prevention. The balanced scorecard and outsourcing are not defining features of TQM.

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