29 Jan 2012 by Aimee Siegler
In a post on
Measuring the Value of Quality,
Paul Borowski laments that we don’t have a line outside the door of
folks searching for answers on how to bring quality to their
organization. Statistics like, “[t]wenty cents of every dollar of
revenue in manufacturing is lost to poor quality” and “[t]hirty cents of
every revenue dollar in service is lost to poor quality” and perhaps
the scariest one, “[s]eventy cents in healthcare” – are you scared yet?
If you’ve every worked in manufacturing, beyond the financial costs of
poor quality, this also results in wasted time, lost customer
satisfaction, and lost resources. Philip Crosby famously said “Quality
is free. It’s not a gift, but it’s free. The ‘unquality’ things are what
cost money.” Whether or not you believe in Crosby’s Zero Defects
philosophy, this quote rings true.
As natural resources become increasingly scarce, a renewed focus on
quality is needed. What if we returned to designing reliable products
that were meant to survive a generation, rather than the current system
of planned obsolescence? What if our leadership provided more incentive
to produce cost avoidance due to doing right the first time instead of
cost reductions and improvement efforts due to kaizan activities? What
if we stopped saying it’s not my job and started saying how can we solve
this problem together? In most organizations, business as usual will
simply not be sustainable in the future. How can we plant the seeds
together to make quality grow? What is growing in your quality garden?
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