Basketball players want to be like Mike, but shoe companies want to be like NIKE. NIKE is the world’s number one shoe company and controls more than 40% of the athletic shoe market. The company designs and sells shoes for just about every sport, including baseball, volleyball, cheerleading, and wrestling. Nike doesn’t only sell athletic shoes, but a wide variety of sporting goods and clothing; they design, develop, and market high quality active sports apparel, equipment, and accessory products.
Their huge lines of products are designed for just about every sport in existence. Their products are made for men, women, and children of all ages. In addition, it operates NIKETOWN shoe and sportswear stores and is opening JORDAN in-store outlets in urban markets. NIKE sells its products to about 19,000 US accounts, in about 140 other countries, and online. Chairman, CEO, and co-founder Phil Knight owns about 36% of the firm.
Total quality management represents both a social revolution in the work place and a rigorously effective approach to professionalism and success. Total quality management is a management system that is an integral part of an organization’s strategy and is aimed at continually improving products and service quality so as to achieve high levels of customer satisfaction and build strong customer loyalty . In other words, the true Total Quality organization will eliminate all competition other than from other Total Quality giants.
Many companies have benefited from an emphasis on TQM; however, it does require a considerable amount of company wide commitment to be successful . The customer doesn’t know what is technically or organizationally feasible. So the key, challenge to a competitive organization, is to raise the expectations of the market place by providing goods and services at quality levels higher than those offered by the competition.
We can now see that there are two principal elements to Total Quality: a business strategic element base on customer-related information, aimed at identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the competition; and an organizational improvement element aimed at ensuring a faster rate of performance improvement in all aspects of the business than cant be achieved by any competitor. The concept of Total Quality doesn’t only apply to commercial organizations; it’s applicable to any type of organization, even to individuals.
Further more, the use of a disciplined and structured approach to project-by-project improvement activities, on a company or organization-wide basis. Project-by-Project improvement activities are an essential element of Total Quality, where the goal is to achieve a faster rate of improvement than any competitor or rival . The fact that an organization is improving is irrelevant if it’s competitor at a faster rate. Therefore, it is the rate of improvement, which is the critical factor.
Nike achieves TQM by integrating principles of sustainability into all major business decisions. Scrutinizing their environment in their day-to-day operations and throughout every stage of the product life cycle. Management Team developed Management planning and managing product portfolio and required human resources throughout the product development lifecycle. Projected benefits include reduced time to market and improved profitability.
Managed the creation of a functional prototype demonstrating improved efficiency and effectiveness of planning and designing a globally coordinated product line. Designed project approach and facilitated teams of employees, retail customers and manufacturing partners in analysis, redesign and implementation of new business processes. Managed information technology professionals and emerging technology exploration activities. Analyzed, redesigned and implemented new business processes, facilitating faster time to market and improved product and service quality.
Implemented pilot of new athletic footwear product creation process in running footwear division, applying learnings, process, tools and organization to entire footwear business. Athletes have a need, for instance, for the shoe to fit their feet. Another important detail is performance. The athletes want Nike shoes to help improve their performance in all aspects and there is also a need for injury protection to prevent serious injury. Nike is working to make sure that whatever footwear they are producing is going to meet the demands of the consumer and athletes.
At Nike, athletes inspire creation. For more than 25 years, Nike has been committed to giving all people who compete so it can be able to recreate the very best performance product – “Products of the imagination,” meaning that these products should make a difference. The Nike Alpha Project is the modern day representation of what their mission has always been. The Nike Alpha Project is about design excellence. It symbolizes their commitment and dedicatedness to create products that perform in ways that far surpass the older creations.
Nike has designers that work with the athletes to gain the a detail of vital information in order to live up to the consumer’s performance needs. Nike then develops footwear, apparel and equipment solutions with complete satisfaction for all consumers, which is a great accomplishment within itself. ISO The International Organization For Standardization is a worldwide federation of national standards bodies from some 130 countries, one from each country .
ISO is a non-government organization, and its mission is to promote the development of standardization and related activities in the world with a view to facilitating the international exchange of goods and services, and to developing cooperation in the spheres of intellectual, scientific, technological and economic activity. Nike international chose ISO 14001, which is created by the international standards organization that help Nike to achieve its environmental obligations and broader environmental performance goals. The Lebanese NIKE retail company implement ISO 9001.
Based on that experience, Nike committed to further improving the indoor air quality of all footwear factories. By 1999, Nike is requiring all footwear factories to meet the air quality levels, based on personal exposure limits (PELs), to at least the levels required by the United States Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). In implementing these standards, they have since modified their goals to incorporate National Industrial Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) standards, which are even more strict.
Nike-designated industrial safety testers conducted indoor air testing of all footwear factories and follow-up testing where required. Nike is committed to maintenance of indoor air quality through continued testing, achievement of OSHA/NIOSH levels of performance, and the management practice necessary to ensure these goals are met on a continuing basis. In 1994, Nike began a program of shifting their footwear factory manufacturing process from petroleum-based solvents to safer water- and detergent-based processes. Today, 95 percent of Nike shoes are made using water-based adhesives.
The difference is immediately apparent when you walk into a production space, rather like the difference between smelling kindergarten paste, and model airplane glue. There are parallel substitutions underway for water- and detergent-based primers, degreasers and cleaners used in the footwear production process. By June 1999, the usage of petroleum-based solvents had been cut 80% from levels in 1995. Their goal is to reduce this usage to zero, and produce 100 percent of our footwear using this state of the art technology in the future.
In the meantime, workers still using the older petroleum-based products will be assured of protection using proper forms of ventilation, worker rotation, Personal Protective Equipment and through other forms of management practices. They typically don’t share breakthrough technology with their competitors. But there are no losers, only winners, when worker health and safety are at stake. In that spirit, they shared this information with Adidas, K-Swiss, Puma, Converse and Reebok. Nike has a special commitment to the environment, not only in the factories where their products are made, but around the world.