Leadership through Quality was a strategy developed by Xerox as a result of competitors being financially strong, technologically advanced and having excellent customer relations. Xerox Corporation through its strategy tries to meet its customer requirements. The strategy is viable as Xerox through this strategy tries ensuring that definition of Quality is meeting the customer requirements all the time.
The three major components of LTQ are Employee Involvement that stresses on integration of employees within a company to achieve the desired goals, Competitive Benchmarking that enables Xerox to seek ways to improve the entire company and Quality Improvement that consistently seeks continual improvement.
It encourages employee involvement in decision making whereby Upper management at Xerox delegates decision making authority to line supervisors and employees. Input from employees is taken seriously, and corporate leaders
...are open to opinions which requires a high degree of flexibility which is essential in a diversified company like Xerox as it ensures goal congruence. Since Xerox is in a document processing market with a high elastic demand for its products the strategy Leadership through quality is an efficient strategy as it strives to improve Xerox’s competitiveness and organisational effectiveness.
The strategy aims to improve quality of Xerox’s products as well as processes thus ensuring that high quality products are available to its customers and meeting its primary goal of customer satisfaction. Leadership through Quality is therefore a viable strategy in the document processing market at Xerox.
Xerox management control systems focussed on the performance of 12 business units which consisted of 9 business units and 3 geographical customer operations supporting them. There was flexibility in their management control systems because each business uni
was given responsibility or opportunity to set their own targets.
The measurements bases at Xerox were a combination of financial and operational targets. The feedback system at Xerox was quite efficient in facilitating the planning process. LTQ and competitive benchmarking were used as major tools to measure operational efficiency. Since the measurements were operational and financial in nature there had to be a unit that could control the financial performance of the business units and as a result of which the FEC evolved in parallel to LTQ.
Xerox culture was more towards open communication. The formal channel was complemented by informal channel of reporting thus bringing about integrity in the company. Open communication helps identify more closely the needs and wants of many customers and hence Xerox can alter its actions according to customer requirements while maintaining good Quality thereby supporting its strategy of LTQ.
Since Xerox is in a market with a very elastic demand for its products a recommendation would be innovation. Xerox would benefit if it constantly innovates and finds new ways of offering its products which would even lead to diversification into even more potential foreign markets and would enable Xerox to utilize its good reputation and favourable image in new related products and services. This would allow Xerox to effectively respond to international needs. Another recommendation would be to improve its business structure as there appears duplication between the Customer Operation division and US market division. Integrating both the divisions would help Xerox cut down unnecessary costs.
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