Quality and risk management activities in virtual organization.

Costache, Bogdan Mihai ; Adamescu, Dorina ; Funar, Stefan Petru 等

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 The Components of the Quality Management System for Virtual Organization

Starting from the system analyses, it is being projected a quality management system for the virtual organization in three groups (Ticoll et al., 1998): client satisfaction group (CS), information technology group (IT), and coordination and audit group (CA). There are three modules of the quality management, one for each of the three groups of the quality management system (Durkin, 1994). The activities and the demands of the quality management are projected for each group as following:

1. The CS group is responsible for the client satisfaction quality management.

At this level, the quality management demands include:

* Investigation of client and market demands.

* Determination of plan quality according to the market and client demands.

* Investigation of client satisfaction and the dynamic market change.

* Propagation of response information on client and market back to the respective company or team, for facilitating the quality verification and improvements.

2. The IT group is responsible for the quality management of information system (including computers, network and software systems).

At this level, the quality management obligations include:

* Quality control of hardware and software projection systems, of partners operations and of the entire virtual organization.

* Quality control of information systems interface between different partners, specifying the standard for information and data exchange between partners in virtual organization.

* Quality control of data and information in virtual organization.

3. The CA group is responsible for the quality management of audit and partners coordination systems. In this direction, the quality management obligations include:

* Audit of the partners 'quality of guarantee validation, quality control systems and monitoring of their execution conditions.

* Coordination of quality activities between partners and conflict settling between them (Dragoi et al., 2005).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

2. MODELS OF QUALITY FOR PRODUCTS AND INDUSTRIAL PROCESSES

For many organizations, risk and quality have become two essential and indispensable priorities (Rosu & Draghici, 2008). The reasoning determined in this step is mainly the following:

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Critical examination of the processes shows important malfunctions. Security is an essential component of production quality in company processes.

Buyers become more exigent over the product and service quality which is being evaluated strictly related to life quality.

Complex processes impose the computer assisted quality approach.

Control evolution over preventive direction and risk administration.

Company space in the international context is being defined by the excellence coordinates: efficiency, environment, maintenance, fiability, security and quality (Schwarzer et al., 1997). The correlation risk-quality expresses the reciprocal relation by which one can identify the conditions and the technical-economic characteristics of avoiding the risk by projecting and monitoring the indicators of total flux quality and of industrial processes. A process can be expressed with the help of the four states (fig.2).

* Ideal state, when the process has capability and is under control, the risk being minimal, up to zero.

* Transition state at limit, when it is under control but it doesn't have capability and the risk is minimal.

* Unstable state, on the edge of chaos, when it has capability, but it is not under control and the risk is growing up to maximum.

* Chaos state, when it doesn't have capability and it is out of control.

3. CONCLUSION

For identifying the reasons for which virtual organization represents the apogee of work organizing in the information society, we must notice that similar to the industrial period and its bureaucratizing, the organizational form of the information era is the network.

If we add the major trends of the end of the second millennium that refer to the market globalization, to the individual consumer orientation and to the industrial sector towards services, to the orientation towards client's needs or to the shorter life cycles of the products, we can have an idea about the way in which the business today or in the future are being managed. Beyond all the mentioned trends, the main reasons for organizing activities in such organizations derive from two aspects:

* Flexibility need growing;

* Efficiency need by using the resources together with other partners.

The flexibility became necessary because of the growing of the environment and organizations exchange. Creating the adding value for clients became a complex process, implying the mingling of different types of knowledge and of a huge volume of knowledge. A group of organizations that, in order to make safe products/services, is using a common knowledge base for all the organizations which create a virtual organization.

Considering this, it is necessary the exact settlement of the quality assurance processes for the products delivered by the virtual organizations and the strict defining of the quality management system in virtual organization.

4. REFERENCES

Dragoi, G.; Cotet, C. E.; Patrascu, G.; Rosu, L. & Rosu, S. M. (2005). Internet/Intranet/Extranet-based systems for virtual product development environment in the CESICED platform, in the Proceedings of the 8th Conference on Management of Innovative Technologies (MIT'2005), 24th-26th September 2005, pp. 67-72, ISBN 961-6238-96-5, Fiesa--Piran, Slovenia.

Durkin, John. Expert Systems. Design and Development. Pretice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1994;

Rosu, S. M. & Draghici, A. (2008). Information system risk estimate as part of project development by virtual teams using expert systems, Academic Journal of Manufacturing Engineering, no. 2/2008, pp. 135-142, ISSN 1583-7904.

Schwarzer, B., S., Zerbe, and H. Krcmar. An Eclectic Framework fat Understand--ing New Organizational Forms, in Social Sciences--Management and Network Technology. 1997. Brussels.

Ticoll, D., Lowy, A., Kalakota, R., Joined at the Bit--the Emergence of the E-Business Community, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1998.