Implementing quality in a sales organization

These are a few of the benefits that IBM in Wisconsin - a sales and service arm of the IBM Corporation - has realized by applying W. Edwards Deming's principles in the format outlined by the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award criteria. Largely following a textbook approach at the corporate level, IBM took the lessons it learned from its successful manufacturing operations (e.g., the Rochester, MN, plant, that won the Baldrige Award in 1990), and began applying them to other parts of the company in a familiar pattern: establishing a quality staff at the headquarter locations, conducting customer surveys to identify strategic or critical focus items needing improvement, developing educational programs on quality, and measuring the critical success factors.