Quality A Buzzword

Quality a Buzzword

Quality in Daily Life

Quality has been an age-old concern: The discerning customer in shops and market-places has applied ‘quality techniques’,prodding and turning fruits and vegetables testing for firmness, freshness and fitness for the purpose of consumption. If the product was not adequate the purchase would not take place. In the hustle and bustle of cattle markets farmers argued and bartered over the fitness of animals for breeding, dairy farming or consumption, providing evidence for their case by inspection against criteria learned from their forefathers. Those shoppers and farmers passed on their knowledge to their children, and similarly it was passed on to their children’s children. I too learned the principles of inspection and learning from my mother as she scrutinized clothes and footwear, fruits and vegetables in our town market. Eager market traders would get short shrift from her if clothes had weak stitching, zips got stuck when zipping, fruits were marked and bruised or vegetables appeared old and unpalatable. The issue of quality of goods and services is not new. Throughout history society has demanded that providers of goods and services should meet their obligations. As long ago as 1700 BC King Hammurabi of Babylon introduced the concept of product quality and liability into the building industry of the time by declaring: …if a building falls into pieces and the owner is killed then the builder shall be put to death. If the owner’s children are killed then the builders’ children shall be put to death.

Japan’s Approach to Quality

Japan, having been burned to the ground during the war, encouraged a climate of change from the start. Japanese managers took seriously the warnings about forthcoming changes in the customer’s perception of quality and about the future demands for faster development of customer-oriented products and services. So they successfully combined the strategy of innovation with that of continuous quality improvement; this brought a reduction in costs, faster development times, prompt deliveries, customer satisfaction, and enormous competitive advantage internationally. The Western approach was always based on the belief that innovation alone was enough for survival and growth. This has already been proved wrong on many occasions. The timing of Juran and Deming in Japan was impeccable. But, it was not only a question of arriving at a time when the Japanese were striving to rebuild their economy. Their ideas
struck a chord in the East. Their emphasis on groups rather than individuals was attractive to the Japanese, while it simply failed to ignite a spark in the United States. Western preoccupation with individual achievement meant that sublimating individual aspirations to group consciousness was a quantum
leap rather than a logical progression. Japanese industry was particularly receptive to the quality message for a number of reasons..

1. The long-established Japanese tradition of finecraftsmanship and attention to detail through miniaturization struck a chord with these concepts.

2. The strongly statistical flavor of the early work with its emphasis on quantifying variation in quality fitted well with the Japanese penchant for numbers.
3. Quality was seen as a national ‘survival’ strategy. It was felt that the only way Japan would be able to afford the food and materials that it needed, being poor in natural resources, was to export goods of high quality at low prices. Quality was thus a key objective.

The American Approach to Quality :

The failure of American corporations to listen to Deming and Juran has often been commented on. In retrospect it appears to be one of the century’s most profound errors. At the time, however, it was understandable. In terms of quality, American products were as good as European ones and far better than those produced in Japan. The American preoccupation was on lowering prices and the vehicle for achieving this was generally recognized to be lowering labor costs. The innovation strategy favored by the United States in the post-war years was the only strategy in a period of low-cost resources, expanding markets and low international competition. At that time, quantity was more important than quality, and management was more concerned with increasing sales than with reducing costs. Western industry believed this would last for ever and ignored the quality-based teachings of experts such as W. E. Deming and Joseph Juran, who, consequently, decided to turn their attention to the East. In a 1993 Harvard Business Review article, Juran also made much of the fact that his Japanese audiences in the early 1950s were the chief executives of major corporations, whereas his North American listeners were primarily engineers and quality inspectors. Juran’s message was not, he admitted, new or revolutionary. Making things to a specific design and then inspecting them for defects was something the Egyptians had mastered 5000 years previously when building the pyramids. The American engineers weren’t ready for history lessons. Deming was similarly well received in Japan. In 1951, the first award ceremony for the now prestigious Deming Prize was held.

* In My Next Blog I will discuss about quality in software industry and its impact.