Quality Is All About Customers' Perceptions

Like beauty and truth, quality is in the eye of the beholder, your customer.

"Perception is all there is..." says Tom Peters. "There is only one perceived reality, the way each of us chooses to perceive a communication, the value of a service, the value of a particular product feature, the quality of a product."

Comprehensive Focus on Quality and Performance Improvement

The best organizations have a systemic and comprehensive focus on quality and performance improvement that applies to all areas of product and service, to all areas of the organization and to all people within the organization. This focus is not just a program, but a way of life, a strategy requiring improvement by everybody in everything all the time and pursuing a vision of everyone doing the right things.

Make Quality a Religion

If you wish to achieve the highest level of quality, you have to recognize the importance of making quality second nature of all your employees. Without it, all the corporate statements, procedures and standards will prove to be rules that are meant to be broken. Making quality a religion is an important extra dimension not to be overlooked.

80/20 Principle & Quality Management

The 80/20 Principle was one of the 'vital few' inputs to the quality revolution which took place  between 1950 and 1990. The observation that losses are always maldistributed in such as way that a small percentage of quality characteristics always contributes a high percentage of the quality loss encouraged quality practitioners to concentrate on diagnosis of the few defects causing most of the problems. According to the 80/20 Principle, effort should be focused on dealing with the 'vital few' sources of off-quality products, rather than tackle all the problems at once. If you remedy the most critical 20% of your quality gaps, you will realize 80% of the benefits.