A Comparative Analysis of Dell's and HP's products and services from Essay

A Comparative Analysis of Dell's and HP's products and services from the Perspective of the Firm and Customer - Essay Example These models have been employed in this paper for checking the status of two popular firms, HP and Dell, in terms of the quality of their products and services. HP is more focused on quality while Dell seems to emphasize on the market performance of their products. However, both firms have made important initiatives to ensure the high quality of their products and services. The effectiveness of their efforts are presented and analysed below using appropriate literature. Table of contents Executive Summary 2 Table of contents 3 1. Introduction 4 2. HP and Dell 7 2a. Analysis of HP’s products and services from the perspective of the firm and customer 7 2b. Analysis of Dell’s products and services from the perspective of the firm and customer 10 2c. Comparative analysis of HP and Dell in regard to their products and services 12 3. Conclusions 15 4. Recommendations 17 References 18 Appendix 19 1. Introduction The development of organizations in the international market is u sually promoted through specific strategies. Competition seems to be of key importance for strategy makers in most firms. Moreover, it has been proved that competing rivals can be a challenging effort, especially during periods of economic instability. On the other hand, firms that are already well established in the global market are more efficient in developing competitive advantage. The potential role of a specific framework, of Total Quality Management (TQM), in the growth of business activities is reviewed in this paper. The products and services of two, well-known, organizations, Hewlett-Packard and Dell, have been reviewed in order to check whether TQM can help modern firms to improve their market position and increase their customer base. The above firms have been chosen on the basis of the following criteria: a) their activation in the same industry, b) their presence in the global market and c) their efforts in regard to the promotion of TQM, as analytically explained in s ection 2 of this study. It should be noted that the involvement of TQM in the design of these firm’s products/ services is reviewed from two different perspectives: the perspective of the firm and the perspective of the customer. Quality is an element of organizational success. Indeed, firms with products/ services of high quality are expected to compete effectively their rivals even in adverse market conditions. Quality, as an element of organizational environment, has appeared after the end of WWII and has been related to ‘the ideas of Edwards Deming’ (Daft and Marcic 2010, p.33). In practice, quality became part of organizational activities due to the initiatives of Japanese firms that first emphasized on the need for ‘the involvement of employees in identifying quality problems across the organization’ (Daft and Marcic 2010, p.33). Different approaches have been used for the promotion of quality in organizations of different structure and culture . One of the most known systems for ensuring quality is the just-in-time system (see Figure 1, Appendix), which was first developed by Toyota. The specific system focuses on the elimination, as possible, of waste, emphasizing on the production only of those products that are necessary and of the amount and quality set by the customer (Ho 1999). It should be noted that the promotion of quality in the organizational environment had appeared quite early, many decades before the introduction of the just-in-time system in Toyota. In fact, it was about 1924 that the first statistical tool for quality control appeared