Quality Holds The Key

The world situation is becoming extremely fluid with the rapid growth in technology, greater consumer awareness, global competition between the developed and the developing countries and changing trade equations.

To truly understand the needs of the customer, supplier companies will have to initiate market research to understand and appreciate the quality requirements that will satisfy the discerning customer and then translate these into product specifications and supporting processes.

Critical to the success of every business is adopting operating targets based on the best possible industry practices.  This can be achieved through benchmarking.  Benchmarking is the search for those practices that will lead to the superior performance of a company.

One has to go a step further and develop flexible processes to respond to changing customer needs.  In order to address these needs, we need to have planning and operational processes that can launch reliable products faster than our closest competitors.

The output of a good quality plan would be superior standards for the processes.  As operations commence, managers and operators control the processes around the standard.  With increased experience around the standards, these same managers and operators should consider continuous quality improvement as an integral part of job design, going beyond the traditional planning and control.

Quality improvement is also a structured approach that has to be carefully adhered to.  It is the basis of a revolution - a revolution where the company completes more quality improvement projects than its nearest competitors.

Quality improvement has several tangible by-products such as reduction in the cost of poor quality products and improvement in product saleability.  These tangible by-products affect the bottom line.

The emphasis on the bottom line is important because a company which sets out to reduce costs associated with poor quality by 50 per cent in three years is more likely to improve its over-all quality performance than the one which sets out to train only 200 people in the improvement process.

Quality improvement can also never take place unless managers at the top level participate actively.  This is because quality is not delegable.  To persuade upper managers to lead the improvement effort requires that they be convinced that the company’s performance in product quality is as strategically important as its financial performance.  In fact, quality gains can be expressed in the form of money.

Given the fact that managers are usually overloaded with work, any additional input on their part needs to be well planned.  The starting point is quality improvement.  Results are quicker and measurable and, therefore, serve as a motivator.  Further, it is not capital-intensive and the returns on investment are over 600 per cent per annum.  These results can be achieved within short time frames (less than a year).

Indian companies that have adopted a structured quality improvement process have achieved astounding results.  Those that are serious in their approach are confident of completing up to 100 projects per annum.  The typical gain from a project is around Rs 5 to 10 lakh.

In Japan, a manager would participate, on an average, in 2.5 projects per annum.  In the USA, for companies that have an ongoing quality improvement programme, managers would average two projects per annum.  In India, it would be about one to two projects per annum for 40 to 50 per cent of the managers.

It is now absolutely certain that future growth will depend on India emerging as a nation that produces quality goods at the right price.  Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts to quality improvement and the effort will have to be made now by individual companies, be they manufacturing or service, to reap a future benefit.