April 2000
The Director - Features
The Best-Practices Funeral Home
Part II: Becoming a Best-Practices Funeral Home
Paying attention to quality should be a never-ending process for funeral home owners and managers. One way to evaluate your firm's quality is using the concept of total quality management (TQM) and continuous quality improvement. The Best-Practices Funeral Home—Part ll: Becoming a Best-Practices Funeral Home reveals the history of TQM and explains how its focus on customer satisfaction can contribute to a positive change in service-oriented organizations. It explains three approaches to business management which form the philosophical basis for a CQI model for funeral firms desiring to prosper in changing times as well as 11 core values and concepts of a world-class organization. Part I of this article, which is in the April 2000 issue of The Director, explains the best-practices concept, which relates to the concept of Total Quality Management. Part III of this article, which is in the May 2000 issue of The Director, explains how to evaluate your funeral home using best-practices. The article was written by Colleen Murphy Klein, education coordinator for the Funeral Service Educational Foundation.
