Total Quality Control (TQC)

Apple had purposed the company to improve the its products by being innovative as they developed the iPhone.  With this being the product that either puts them into the history books or puts them in the bankruptcy courts, they were determined to deliver a quality product. Jobs now fully rooted in the company took the lead and became the true face of the company, monitoring progress at every level and push his innovators to indeed come develop the next big thing.  He sought to improve the overall process from concept to selling the products at Apple store, making necessary incremental changes to the system as he saw fit.  In the 1980s and early 90s Apple had many different suppliers for the cases of its computer lines.  However, for the iPhone they move to Jabil Circuit out of China, whom they had the closest relationship with, to be their sole supplier of iPhone cases.  The development process had to be revamped a few times as the team constantly imagined ways that consumers would use this product.  Jobs was very big on proper training as any variation of his quality standards was inacceptable. He insured that the workers were trained and cross trained in their duties and the duties of the stations adjacent to them.  He trained his managers to facilitate the workflow of both men and machine, and required managers to be experts in their field, not some much so they can inspect for errors but so they would have the knowledge to fix errors should they occur.  This resulted in more confident employees as they didn’t feel that management was there to look over their shoulders, but rather they felt confident that leadership was there to help should they need it.  Job emphasized how important of a role that teamwork played in the overall production process, how all department must work together it the product and the company would be a success.  Instead calling for defect reports and expressing how horrible making mistakes are, Job just drove home one slogan, lets produce the next big thing.  This gave workers a level of pride in the product they were developing and producing, thus cutting down on errors.  For the errors and defects that did remain Jobs had his BI team to look at the process and identify exactly what part of the process the errors and defects occurred and address that problem head on.  At times he even had to realign the whole system to make the process run smoothly.  In stead of having quotas and management objectives Jobs encourages both managers and workers to simply strive to be better that their jobs every day.  After the product was developed Jobs called a company meeting and expressed his appreciation to the whole team that put there all in to developing the product. He held and iPhone up and said, “You did this! you created the next big thing.  Regardless of whether you played what may be seen as a big or small part, your contribution was both hug and invaluable.”   Then Jobs point out that as one project end a new one must begin, and he announce that ever would be new training on the possible additions that would come in the iPhone 2.  Apple heavily invested in the betterment of their workers and once again reevaluated the process to make it more efficient before development of the iPhone 2 began.