At the very least, this can be confusing to those who deliver cleaning products or services and to those who buy them. That is why we must explore quality in an objective, rational way. For this review, I want to set aside the popular notions of quality and focus on quality from the limited perspective of the central question for this paper: Is quality about the product or the customer? If quality is about the product or service, then quality is a simple matter of produc-ing products or delivering services whose measurable characteristics satisfy a fixed set of specifications that are generally defined by the traditional notion of a check-list or activity list. If quality is about customer satisfaction, then quality products and services are simply those that satisfy customer expec-tations for their use or consumption. Crosby doesn’t address this issue, but I get the impression that his answer to this question is, “Yes, it’s about the specifying product.” W. Edwards Deming Deming changed our lives by advocating more structured ways for people and orga-nizations to plan for quality and continually improve relationships, processes, products and services. His philosophy is one of cooperation and continual improvement, and it doesn’t fix blame while seeing mistakes as opportuni-ties for improvement. Deming is perhaps best known for his work in Japan. There, from 1950 onward, he taught top management how to improve the design of products and services through various methods including the application of statistics. Deming was the creator of the “plan-do-check-act” model. Deming does not settle on a concise definition of quality. In any event, Deming’s perspective is consistent with a customer-focused defi-nition. In fact, the title of his chapter on quality is titled, “Quality and the Consumer,” indi-cating the extent to which he equates high quality and customer satisfaction. In the end, Deming is advocating that the customer defines quality, not the buyer, not the manager or even the consultant. The difficulty in defining quality for Deming is to translate future needs of the user into measurable characteristics so that a product or service can be designed and produced or delivered to give satisfaction at a price that the buyer is willing to pay. It’s not always easy, and as soon as we’re confident we understand quality, we find that the needs of the customer have changed, competitors have copied us, or worse, we’ve become commoditized. Phillip Crosby Crosby is best known for his “zero defects” concept and his best-selling book, Quality is Free . He is known for translating quality ter-minology into more common terms, which everyone could understand, using real situ-ations and fictional characters. Crosby’s emphasis is that doing things right the first time adds nothing to the cost of a product or service. In Crosby’s view, what costs more are reworks, tests, warranties, inspections, services, damaged reputations and even litigation after doing things the wrong way. Crosby also emphasized that problems with quality are caused by management actions. Crosby seems to adhere to the idea that quality is defined by the buyer document-ing the practices of the service provider, contracted or in-house — what we would call the task/frequency specification. It is not at all clear from Crosby’s definition whether there are different levels or attributes inherent in his view of quality as binary. For example: Acceptable and unaccept-able; delivered, not delivered; completed, not completed. It’s not clear, for example, that all product or service units that conform to the speci-fied requirements are of equal quality. Armand Feigenbaum Some say that the name Feigenbaum and the term “total quality control” are virtually synonymous. Feigenbaum’s ideas are contained in his classic book, Total Quality Control , first published in 1951 under the title, Quality Control: Principles, Practice, and Administration. His Total Quality Management book also became a standard text for an entire industry. The book has been translated into more languages than any such paper, including Japanese, Chinese, French and Spanish. He views quality as an effective system for integrating the product and service development, quality maintenance and quality improvement efforts of the various groups in an organization so as to deliver products and services at the most eco-nomical levels, which allow full customer satisfaction. Interestingly, Feigenbaum highlighted the idea of a “hidden” plant — the idea that so much extra work is performed in correcting mistakes that there is effectively a hidden plant within any factory. Feigenbaum’s definition of quality is about the customer. His message was to move away from focusing on the technical aspect of quality control and seeing quality as not meaning a product that might be called “best” but, rather, what might be called “best for the customer.” If quality determination is up to the cus-tomer and we need a surrogate for quality for the product or service delivered, then we have to translate customer satisfaction into product or service attributes. Feigenbaum notes that marketing evalu-ates the level of quality customers expect and are willing to pay for. This need to determine what custom-ers are willing to pay is the mechanism to approximate their ideal product or service and then translate that information into specifications for a variety of product or service attributes is the nightmare that challenges every quality advocate. Feigenbaum’s ideas seem weak on the subject of translating customer expectations into product or service speci-fications. On the other hand, it is difficult to find a better outline of the basic components and issues of a modern quality-focused organi-zation than the one presented in his book. Much of his thinking could easily become a certification course. www.cmmonline.com 29
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