Stratton, Brad (1997, ASQ) ASQ, Milwaukee, WI
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Business excellence through total quality at Texas Instruments (TI) is the product of organizational strengths that include: customer focus, supplier relationships, teams, and policy deployment. Interviews with president and chief executive officer (CEO) Thomas J. Engibous and other officials reveal that TI goes beyond listening to the customer by anticipating end user needs and being ready to offer solutions. This requires knowledge of human behavior, which TI gains through programs like its home theaters and home interior research labs. Long-term relationships with companies like U.S. Robotics, Seagate, and Nokia are vital to TI's movement away from finished products and toward microchip components for its partners. This trend depends on TI encouraging engineers around the world to design these components into their companies' products. To accomplish this, TI cultivates educational partnerships. These have led to university research funding; student internships; faculty resident programs; and international activities, as in the technical and teaching assistance supplied to Chinese universities. The TI culture is built around high-performance teams, including the strategy leadership team that leads the company. When former president and CEO Jerry Junkins died unexpectedly, the team raised itself to be a higher performance team. The TI approach to quality relies on policy deployment, also known as breakthrough planning or hoshin planning. This strategic planning process establishes organizational vision statements upon which are based all goals and work plans.
Business partnerships,Case study,Customer focus,Education,Policy deployment,Teams
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