The greater the difference between what society actually gets and what it wants, the less quality society will experience. In truth, this concept of societal loss is a little confusing. On the other hand, if you replace the “societal loss” idea with a “customer loss” idea, the concept is a way an individual customer might actually think about the AM Page 11 quality. Taguchi says, “Quality is the loss a prod-uct causes to society after being shipped.” Or, I suspect, a service delivered. If we are correct in suggesting each potential customer in a marketplace has a quality profile that looks much like this, then the challenge for us is to estimate the loss to society by somehow aggregating the quality loss of individuals to obtain a societal quality profile. Then, by minimizing loss to society — which is Taguchi’s objective — we maxi-mize quality. In a real sense, this is the challenge that confronts the market research and design and the product or service development efforts of every company. Is Taguchi’s definition about product quality or customer quality? Although it is not easy to tell from his writings, I think that Taguchi’s definition is about customer quality. Taguchi is, unfortunately, unclear about how societal quality can be determined. He tries to explain his idea, unsuccess-fully, for individual customers who make up a given marketplace. How you can go about the business of determining loss to society if the model’s input information is a collection of quality profiles of individual customers? Yet, it is clear that his focus is about the customer. Conclusion So, is quality about the product or the customer? Clearly, there are differences and shades of opinion on this question. The expert opinion is nearly evenly split. So, on a bet, you’d be safe to take either position. Yet, there is a clear pattern that, even where product quality reigns as most important, customer input and require-ments is a factor in design. Given the review, it seems that the earli-est of the quality gurus, Shewhart, gets it right. Both definitions of quality are important and driven by the dominance of satisfying the customer. For my part, I’m going with the customer idea for quality. Without the customer, the quality of the product just doesn’t matter. If you’re listening carefully, the customer will tell you what’s important and what quality means to them. Your task is then to design and deliver a product or service that they are willing to pay for. An exceptional design is an engineer-ing success; an exceptional customer is a business success. CM connect with05 CMM Online Bulletin Board SUBSCRIBE/RENEW PRODUCT INFORMATION www.cmmonline.com 31
CMM – Archives Dec 2011: 31
