Case study: Andrew Ryan at VC Brakes Essay

1. Analyze the effectiveness of the approach to change taken at VC Brakes. 2. Was Andrew Ryan effective? What could he have done differently? 3. Should Ryan stay at VC Brakes and continue to help with the TQM initiative? If so, what should he do differently? The approach taken was the right thing to do and in my opinion was well planned. The fact that it didn’t work out however means that it wasn’t the right fit for the organizational culture of VC Brakes. If VC Brakes had no division between the engineers and the rest of the operations I believe the approach would have provided successful results. Andrew Ryan was effective in his original endeavors as the senior manager of the engineering services (ES) team. However I think this question is referring to his task of implementing TQM into VC Brakes, so in that regard no he was not effective. Although TQM had great values Ryan was unable to break the divider between management and lower level employees to make progress wi th TQM. Lower level employees were said to have some creative and (in my opinion) easy to fix ideas on current operations. For example the box cutters that were standard were said to not be up to par. Although upper management didn’t change the box cutters out for new ones originally Ryan could have told upper management to change the box cutters simply as a way to get employees on board with the idea of implementing TQM. If Ryan had exhausted his efforts to make the change happen internally, he could have went out and bought new box cutters himself and said that upper management heard to voice of the people and responded. Box cutters aren’t very expensive and this action would have shown leadership to upper management, and would have most likely shown lower level employees to give TQM circles more effort. If Ryan was unwilling to purchase the box cutters himself, he could have had the simple idea to allow the employees bring in their own box cutters to solve the problem altogether. If the company had some restriction against this idea of bringing cutters from home Ryan should do his best to explain once again that this is bigger than the box cutters, it’s about progressing forward as a whole company working together.