IMPACT OF PRODUCT QUALITY ON SALES VOLUME OF AN ORGANIZATION (A CASE STUDY OF NIGERIAN BOTTLING COMPANY)

ABSTRACT

The research is focused on the impact of product quality on sales volume in Nigerian Bottling Company. The objectives of this study are to understand the various production control problems and also to understand the impact of pricing on quality product. The researcher used primary and secondary for data collection and questionnaire was administered to the respondents. The findings out that the Quality control section is responsible for quality control in Nigeria Bottling Company. Quality product increase the sales volume of Nigerian Bottling Company. Thus the entire organizational objectives will be incomplete without quality control objectives clearly and properly stated and incorporated into the mainstream of organizations objectives. Finally, the study recommended that Regular induction courses such as seminars, workshops, and training programmes for staff should be organized for quality control personnel. So that the staff will have a better and up-to- date knowledge on quality control activities thereby achieving adequate satisfaction required by customers as regard to their products.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1    BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

Process industries in general face a continuous drive to improve their operations. This drive is enforced by global competition, (environmental) regulation and consumer demands (e.g. Mittal (2001)). A contribution to the improvement of the operations can be achieved by implementing an improved control strategy in the process aiming at increased productivity and flexibility in operations (Trystram and Courtois (2003) and decrease of product loss, increase of product quality and its regularity. Also more cost efficient operation is an important motivation for the implementation of a new control strategy. Currently, in process operations one usually measures the different process variables, such as temperature, humidity, pressure and flows, quite frequently. This allows for tight control of these process variables. The set points are determined off-line in advance and are usually constant, or, at best, manually adjusted as conditions change out of the normal. In contrast, quality variables, which are the key indictors for the performance of the overall process, are measured off-line, if measured at all, but are usually rather slow. Thus their use in control applications introduces time delays and periods where the process is not operating on specifications (Chen et al. (2003).

However, improvement of process operations with respect to product quality requirements can only be achieved by combining knowledge about both the product and the process, as e.g. for drying operation is concluded by Kerkhof (2000). This motivates the development of a control methodology that can be used to determine the most appropriate control strategy for a specific process operation. Although its results may be used to improve process operations in other industries, this thesis focuses on food processing and then especially on the class of climate controlled operations.

If a product fulfils the customer’s expectations, the customer will be pleased and consider that the product is of acceptable or even high quality. If his or her expectations are not fulfilled, the customer will consider that the product is of low quality. This means that the quality of a product may be defined as “its ability to fulfil the customer’s needs and expectations”. Quality needs to be defined firstly in terms of parameters or characteristics, which vary from product to product. For example, for a mechanical or electronic product these are performance, reliability, safety and appearance. For pharmaceutical products, parameters such as physical and chemical characteristics, medicinal effect, toxicity, taste and shelf life may be important. For a food product they will include taste, nutritional properties, texture, shelf life and so on.

Indeed, it is of these above that Crittal-Hope has quality control department to carryout full responsibility of quality control of the organization products. Quality means different thing to different people, in a layman term, quality entails some degree of excellence or superiority. Excellence or superiority is a relative word whereby what is qualified as excellence by one may not be excellence to another person. Control takes the form of meeting standard quality according to specification. The process through which we establish and meet standard is simply "control” when such process is established and applied to problems of product quality and product standardization, then it is called quality control.