Important Background:
The Canbide Corporation is a U.S.-based, multi-national, publicly traded, manufacturing company with annual sales nearing $10 billion. Canbide is one of the pioneers of the petrochemical industry and is the acknowledged technology leader in several market sectors, and benefits from large licensing royalty checks for those technologies. Canbide is the low cost producer for a number of commodity products. Canbide's current marketing approach is based on providing a wide selection of products from a single location, more than any of their competitors.
The Central Central Engineering and Research Department (CERG), experts in specific subjects that cross divisional boundaries. The employees in CERG generally work as internal consultants for the divisional research and engineering groups and often work on plant level issues.
A Quality Program for CERG: With the increasing prevalence of ISO 9000 programs, Canbide has initiated a corporate wide Excellence through Quality (EQ) program. Most of the plants and operational locations have already launched their EQ programs. Now, Mr. Harkins, the VP of Central Engineering and Research Group (CERG), has picked you to help develop and implement the EQ program for his corporate level engineering and R&D groups.
Problem: The Central Engineering and Research Group (CERG) is a service group. Since Deming, Juran and Crosby wrote primarily about "products". How do their theories apply to your group?