What has happened to the 1990’s hype surrounding quality management in corporate India? Has ISO 9000 and TQM slipped from the first page because the war against defects has been won? Or is corporate India deluding itself into thinking that quality is no longer the huge problem it once was?
It was only a decade ago that CEO’s like Suresh Krishna, Chandra Mohan and Dr Jamshed Irani from Sundram Fasteners, Punjab Tractors and Tata Steel respectively, undertook a Herculean effort to improve their products in the face of global (and domestic) competition. They embraced TQM concepts, over and above ISO 9000, and implemented new ways to find and fix problems in their manufacturing processes.
A decade earlier, quality gurus such as W Edwards Deming and Joseph M Juran reached star status in the USA. They taught corporate America to improve their products in the face of formidable Japanese competitors such as Toyota, Canon and NEC. The first to bite were the CEOs of Motorola, Ford and Xerox. And they succeeded. During the same period, new research centers sprang up across the US with much fan fare. Also, the Department of Commerce established the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.
Little of this excitement remains. Quality is no longer a competitive differentiator because, in my opinion, it is now understood to be the mere price of entry. The emphasis of the subject has shifted from quality of product to that of process performance, and currently to quality of management performance. Obviously, the front page news has changed. One now reads about WIPRO, Infosys, TCS, HDFC, ICICI and others. One reads about the leadership of these organizations, their customer focus and service delivery. Is this not quality? One also reads about Sundram Fasteners winning the best supplier award from General Motors for four years in a row. Is this not a recognition of the quality of management performance?
In fact, the importance of quality has not diminished. Only the hype is dead. If anything at all, as Indian companies turned their telescopes to global markets they realized that a low cost strategic advantage was myopic and insufficient. They also realized that ISO 9000 (1994) did little to establish their product credibility. They finally understood that quality is defined in the market place. The ultimate test being to get the customer to vote for your offering with his/her money. Or else, have no means to pay salaries!
Quality is not just concerned with whether or not a product or service meets the claims made for it. Today’s quality is much more than this. The modern concept of quality embraces how the company meets all its customer’s requirements including how they are greeted on the telephone; the speed with which sales staff respond to a request for a quotation; having new products and services required and even ensuring the invoice is correct. Every contact with the customer, on every occasion, at every level builds a picture of the sort of company with which a customer is doing business. Of course, any product or service supplied has to meet its requirements; but this is the beginning – not the end - of the quest for a Total Quality Organization.
Looking forward. The aim of competition will be to aggressively nullify our strengths. While competition will be able to benchmark and replicate our products and processes to exact and even better quality performance standards, what they will not be able to replicate is the quality of people. People will make the difference. The quality of people will make the big difference.
Towards building this differentiator, corporate India will need to invest in human capital. Individuals will be required to update their university education with professional quality certifications – as engineers, managers, auditors, facilitators and trainers. The tuition and examination fees for these qualifications will form part of the company pay package. Achieving professional certification, such as that offered by the American Society for Quality, will be a factor for career advancement.
Looking forward again. Purchase decisions of customers will be governed by a company’s process capabilities, as well as, the professional quality certifications of key personnel. This will be the norm. As is the practice at Toyota and General Motors.
In addition, corporate India will measure the quality of management performance using structured models based on the Malcolm Baldrige criteria. Several groups of companies have already commenced using these models: House of Tatas, RPG Group, TVS Group and more. Half the battle lies in starting to measure and thereafter tracking the quality of management performance.
There will be several more mandates in the years to come. For example, creativity tools will be integrated in all problem solving methodologies to turbo-charge the journey to solutions. Reliability of offerings will make first page headlines in a web world. And the government of India will adopt quality practices to reduce their costs of poor quality which are a conservative one-third of total costs!
CREDITS: Suresh Lulla, Founder & Mentor, Qimpro Consultants Pvt. Ltd.