Case Essay

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CASES Case 1-1 FedEx: Managing Quality Day and Night FedEx Homepage: www.fedex.com As darkness falls across America and most businesses are locking up for the evening, one company is gearing up for a long night’s work. FedEx, the world leader in the overnight package delivery market, delivers more than 7.6 million packages per business day. Most of us know FedEx as the overnight delivery company with white delivery vans, courteous drivers, and the distinctive purple-and-orange FedEx logo. But behind what the casual observer sees is a very complex company with the capacity to deliver millions of packages to mil- lions of addresses around the globe overnight. Through- out the course of virtually every day and night, FedEx mobilizes its army of 280,000 employees, 80,000 vans and trucks, and 684 planes to get the job done. For FedEx, getting the job done means managing quality 24 hours a day, with a watchful eye on customer expectations. The company’s goals are simple: 100% customer satisfaction, 100% on-time deliveries, and 100% accurate information available on every shipment to every location around the world. Although these sound like far-fetched goals, the company goes to great lengths to try to make them a reality. One of the principal weapons that FedEx uses in pursuit of its goals is its total commitment to quality management. Quality management at FedEx encompasses all of its operations. Although the company is the acknowledged leader in the air freight industry, a formal Quality Improvement Process (QIP) plays an integral role in all of the company’s activities.9 At the heart of the QIP program is the philosophy that quality must be a part of the way that FedEx does business, not part of the time, but all of the time. As a result, themes such as “Do it right the first time,” “Make the first time you do it the only time anyone has to,” and “Q = P” (quality =
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