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Quality Basics
If your objective in business is to succeed over the long run, you must take a number of things for granted.
- Building market share, and deepening existing customer relationships, are the top objectives.
- The best way to achieve this is to improve quality and diversify offerings.
- We must transform our companies, our work and even ourselves with a quality orientation.
- Empowered teams of employees will get "it" done.
The word "quality" has two dimensions. The first dimension addresses reliability and consistency. If a product or service reliably and consistently meets customer expectations, than it has high quality status. The second quality dimension covers the attributes or features of the product or service. On this count, high quality status is given to products and services that enable customers to do what they could not do with other, lesser offerings.
This eManual will help you to improve the reliability and consistency of your products and services. To improve features and attributes, you must use a value engineering approach to identify customer needs and design outputs to meet these needs. One powerful technique for improving features and attributes is called Quality Function Deployment, and will be detailed in an upcoming eManual from Synerlux Corporation.
To improve reliability and consistency, teams must use a statistically-sound approach to measuring, analyzing and improving quality. But this is not the work of high speed computers or quality inspectors. Cross-functional teams will have to apply their creativity and insight to generate improvements and innovations. But make no mistake -- when it comes to quality excellence, there is no room for "guesstimates", "hunches" or preconceived ideas about what customers want. Every decision, every initiative must be educated by factual data, sound reasoning and observable theory.
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