Managing Finance for Quality: Bottom-Line Results from Top-Level Commitment

A worldwide quality revolution is taking place based on a new style of managing. Total quality management (tqm) is a customer-focused, transformational management technology. It enables companies to exceed customer expectations by empowering organizational members, reducing cycle time, and continuously improving products, services, and the processes that produce them.
This book is a landmark study of how finance is changing in companies committed to tqm. As companies adopt the tqm management technology and adapt it to their own unique history and competitive circumstances, the finance function is expected to be a full player in the emerging tqm system. Quality management has immediate and extensive implications for the daily work of finance professionals, and finance professionals have major new contributions to make to the entire organization.
This unique book reports a Financial Executives Research Foundation study of the finance function of five organizations deeply committed to tqm - Corning International, Federal Express, Motorola, Solectron, and Southern Pacific. In addition to the quality successes of these companies, each of the finance functions have achieved dramatic success in adopting and applying quality management in finance. The case studies show how these finance leaders applied tqm in their companies. You can use this valuable information to benchmark leading applications of finance quality management in your organization.

James A. F. Stoner is professor of management systems at Fordham University's Schools of Business.