Quality Management
How do you define the
quality of your organisation’s outputs and what do you measure them
against? What is important about quality
to you - the actual product or service, the experience your Customer receives
or economic effects of the way you do things – perhaps all of these?
Quality is an
attribute – something we subjectively assign to products and services, calling
them high quality or low quality or maybe average – but what does it mean? Unless a clear benchmark is set then there is
nothing to measure against and one company’s high quality could be another’s
low quality – yet be equal.
More confusion arises
about quality assurance and quality control – one purports
to manage by processes which result in predictable repeatable quality whilst
the other checks products against set standards for compliance or failure
within set tolerances. For those wishing
to take things further there is of course Six Sigma and the tighter rigours
that it brings.