Achieving Superior Quality

Quality can be thought of in two terms: Quality as reliability, Quality as excellence

Superior quality provides company a strong reputation for quality by which it can compete with
the products offered by the competitors and also by eliminating defects or errors from the
production process reduces waste, increases efficiency, and increases profitability.
Six Sigma methodology has an accuracy of 99.99966%, creating just 3.4 defects per million
units.
Quality as reliability: Improvement in product reliability is a cross-functional process.
● First, the senior managers need to agree to a quality improvement program and
communicate its importance to the organization.
● Second, if a quality improvement program is to be successful, individuals must be
identified to lead the program(Black belts).
● Third, quality improvement techniques need to identify defects that arise from processes,
trace them to their source, and make corrections so that they do not recur. One technique
that helps effectively in tracing defects to the source is reducing lot sizes for
manufactured products.
● Fourth, Key to any quality improvement program is to create a metric that can be used to
measure the quality of the product.
● Fifth, the next step is to set a challenging quality goal and create incentives for reaching
it.
● Sixth, shop-floor employees must participate and must be incorporated into a quality
improvement program.
● Seventh, Poor-quality finished goods are because of the poor-quality component parts.
The company must work with its suppliers to improve the quality of the parts they
supply.
● Eighth, the more assembly steps a product requires, the more chances for making
mistakes. Thus, designing products with lesser parts is often a major component of any
quality improvement program.
● And lastly, implementing quality improvement techniques requires the whole
organization’s commitment. R&D must collaborate with production to design products
that are easy to manufacture.

Quality as Excellence: Products are differentiated by attributes that collectively define product
excellence.
● First, it is important for managers to do market research collect information regarding
which of the attributes are most important to customers.
● Second, once the company has identified the attributes that a customer is looking for, it
needs to design its products and the associated services in such a way that it covers all the
attributes.
● Third, the company must decide which of the significant attributes to promote and how
best to position them in the minds of consumers, which creates a consistent image in the
minds of customers.
● Finally, it must be recognized that competition is not stationary, there should be
continuous improvement in product attributes, and often the development of new product
attributes.