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A Question of Quality By Ed Romson, CEO, Rocair Corporation During my recent trip to India, I had a chance to visit several types of businesses. I interviewed Call Center Directors, I had meetings with the Chamber of Commerce, and I also toured auto parts manufacturing plants. One aspect of all this work in India stood out. There is a heavy focus on quality systems and quality certifications for all types of businesses. As I have said before, I think that business leaders in Argentina can learn from the work of their Indian counter-parts, especially when those businesses deal with clients and customers external to Argentina. In my estimation, one of the reasons that businesses in India focus so much on achieving quality certifications is to allow them show the world that the products produced in India meet the highest quality standards. I believe this has been done to counter a perception of poor quality. This perception does not reflect reality, but if consumers do not know much about a country, or the products from a country, they can make wrong assumptions about those products. In the minds of customers from the USA, Argentina is located either very far away or just south of Mexico. Many North Americans would find it difficult to point to Argentina on a map. My point is that businessmen from the USA know very little about the high quality of work and the excellent products and services that are produced in Argentina. When they are approached by companies from Argentina they need to be convinced of your capabilities. Let us take a lesson from Indian businesses and use quality processes and quality certifications as a marketing tool to convince external customers to look at doing business with Argentina. At the risk of telling you what you already know, here are some thoughts about quality. Quality systems and processes have costs associated with them. The same is true for the effort to implement those systems. These costs can be called the "cost of conformance" and the "cost of non-conformance." The cost of quality is the amount of money a business loses because its product or services were not done right the first time. From fixing a warped piece on the assembly line to dealing with a lawsuit because of a malfunctioning machine or a badly performed service, businesses lose a lot of money due to poor quality. The cost of conformance is part of the 'Cost of Quality' for a work product. The cost of conformance is the total cost of making sure that a product is of good 'Quality'. It includes the costs of quality assurance activities such as standards, training, and processes and costs of quality control activities such as reviews, audits, inspections, and testing. The cost of non-conformance is that element of the 'Cost of Quality' representing the total cost to the organization of failure to achieve a good 'Quality' product. Cost of non-compliance includes both in-process costs generated by quality failures, particularly the cost of 'rework'; and post-delivery costs, including further 'rework', re-performance of lost work (for products used internally), possible loss of business, possible legal actions, and other potential costs. Many Indian companies have worked very hard to gain ISO9000 certification and to use this certification as the marketing tool I mentioned above. "ISO 9000 is primarily concerned with 'quality management'. Like 'beauty', everyone may have his or her idea of what 'quality' is. In plain language, the standardized definition of 'quality' in ISO 9000 refers to all those features of a product (or service), which are required by the customer. 'Quality management' means what the organization does to ensure that its products conform to the customer's requirements" (from the ISO website). The ISO 9001/2000 standard establishes the requirement standard for a company to use to assess their ability to meet customer requirements and to abide by various regulatory standards, thus ensuring high customer satisfaction. If you should decide to move toward implementing a quality system and perhaps even work toward ISO 9000 certification, you will gain benefits in many areas. Your products or services will improve, your processes will become smoother and more efficient, your cost of non-conformance will eventually go down, and your image will improve with your local and regional customers and with your customers external to the region. There is, of course, a cost to your business to implement these ideas. However, over time, the returns on that investment in quality will come from existing customers who return to do more business with you, from the new customers you win because of high quality, and from the new business you are able to generate from outside of Argentina.© Copyright Rocair Corporation. All rights reserved. |
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