AHEAD of World Quality Day (WQD), it is imperative that the public and private sectors work together to find a permanent solution for packaging materials.
Safari Fungo, the Chief Executive Officer for the National Quality Association of Tanzania (NQAT), issued the advice in Dar es Salaam yesterday.
“As a nation, we need to develop a strategy to ensure that a permanent solution is found for the issue of packaging, as it is one of the challenges that most entrepreneurs in the country face,” he said.
According to him, NQAT has visited several entrepreneurs in the country and conducted quality capacity-building seminars for more than 100 entrepreneurs, during which they discovered that the issue of packaging was the most challenging for all of them.
Mr Fungo stated that Tanzania will commemorate WQD on November 10 this year by hosting the second Tanzania Quality Summit, which will bring together more than 200 stakeholders from the private and public sectors.
‘Quality conscience: Doing the right thing’ is set to be the focus for WQD and will give quality professionals an opportunity to reflect on how corporate culture can be key to helping organisations make the right ethical decisions on behalf of all stakeholders.
“Doing the right thing gets to the heart of quality management in any organisation and what the quality profession is all about. After all, providing and improving the quality of products and services is done by people who have to make decisions every day, often balancing a variety of stakeholder interests,” he said.
He added, “We must recognise the complexity of this challenge, how management systems can help translate values and policy aspirations into daily work at all levels, the importance of leaders in setting the tone, and why doing the wrong thing will ultimately harm the organisation’s reputation and, in the worst-case scenario, lives,”.
Mr Fungo further said quality management is not only about designing and improving the quality of products and services, but also about the methods organisations employ to deliver them to customers and stakeholders across their value stream.
He said this year’s theme provides an opportunity to reflect on how corporate culture and conscience can help or hinder an organisation to make decisions and ‘do the right thing’ for all stakeholders.
Among the topics to be discussed at the summit, he said, are how public and private institutions can achieve high levels of service and product quality, human resources and customer satisfaction.
