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Quality offers organizations significant opportunities for improvement, including reduced costs, increased sales, better performance to schedule, and more satisfied customers. A successful quality system does more than ensure the quality of products and services; it drives vigorous operations and leads to a healthy bottom line. Successful quality systems share common elements:
Management
A quality system cannot succeed without the active and continuous involvement of line and staff managers. Successful quality systems require a partnership in responsibility for improving quality and achieving results. Everyone shares the responsibility for quality.
Customers
Every organization needs to know its customers. Successful organizations tell customers what their products are supposed to do—and then ask them how well the products performed.
Design
Quality has to be designed into a product or service. An organization can only do that by bringing design and development personnel in on the quality effort along with marketing, production, and customer support.
Purchasing
Suppliers are partners, not adversaries in the quality effort. Smart organizations evaluate a supplier’s price and quality, and, if necessary, help them improve their quality system.
Production
Production equals people working with processes to produce goods and services. Employees need training, tools, and clear work instructions to efficiently produce high quality designs.
Education and Training
Everyone has an influence on quality—line workers, middle management, support staff, and senior executives. They all benefit from training in the principles of quality.
Participative Management
Providing skills and training is not enough; managers must encourage staff to solve problems independently. Managers needs to tap into a company’s most valuable resource, employees, to boost productivity and cut costs.
Statistics
Decision makers need to know the risks involved in their decisions. Successful organizations know statistics can be the difference between failure and success in controlling processes and solving problems.
Technology
Advances in computerization and robotics promise huge gains in productivity—if automated systems are not producing products that must be reworked.
Quality Costs
Organizations can spend money on quality by investing in good quality or by paying for poor quality. Successful ones invest in good quality because they know it costs much less over the long term.
Auditing
An effective quality audit provides companies with solid information about how people, systems, and products are performing in terms of quality.
Ongoing Improvement
The secret to success in quality is preventing problems. To help improve quality and prevent problems before they occur, quality teams can be established to bridge departmental barriers.
