Quality is probably one of the least understood and most misused terms in the dictionary. What does a company mean when it boasts that it delivers a high quality service or makes a high quality product?
For many years supermarkets strived to provide fruit that was truly beautiful to behold, perfectly shaped, highly polished, blemish free and rot proof. We, the customers, demanded this and they absolutely fulfilled our expectation.
We’re now a lot wiser to the waste generated by this type of product and the associated high production costs. It’s not cheap to have to remove all sub-standard fruit, lovingly polish apples till they gleam and present them in soft well furnished display packs. We’re now a lot more aware of our impact on the environment and economies. We have also realised that a lot of hugely misshapen fruits are actually very nice to eat! Our requirement as a consumer has changed and the supermarkets have reacted by delivering to this new expectation for reasonably presentable, tasty and morally sound fruits.
I bet you would struggle if I asked you which of these approaches delivered a higher quality product? The simple answer is that they both met the client expectations. Perhaps we need to stop our obsession with the term quality and instead get obsessive about our clients expectations of our services and products.
I suspect that some people may be wondering what the heck this has to do with the title of this entry ‘Profitable Quality’? Put simply we need to change the emphasis from doing things right to deliver a service or product to doing the right things to meet the client expectations. I’m not advocating that we ride roughshod over any control procedures or audit trails, but we do need to continually ask ourselves the question, is what I’m doing going to help me meet and exceed client expectations.
I can kid myself that I’m producing fantastic high quality hand crafted widgets but if they are not delivered to a client on schedule it may impact their ability to deliver their own services and products, hence lose sales or increase costs. If my widgets are a little bit less polished, not quite so lovingly boxed but still perfectly functional they be just what my client needs to meet his requirement.
Many service functions fall down the quality trap by focusing on the various quality standards and hoping that these assure a quality product, amongst all this process compliance they tend to lose sight of those key client expectations. It's easy when you are small to keep the focus on your client but it becomes much harder as organisations grow and have to rely on large complex work breakdown structures for delivery to retain this focus.
The warning signs are usually pretty easy to spot, just check how many times the term client or customer fail appear at the top of an organisations departmental and functional objectives, or how many references to quality appear instead. Without an obsession for meeting and exceeding client expectations in all the processes that capture requirements, control and provide services and products the result may be the delivery of what is perceived as a ‘high quality’ service or product but one that may still fail to meet client expectations and have incurred a lot more cost to produce than was strictly necessary.
Profitable quality simply means understanding what the client needs and providing it when they want it and at a cost of delivery that meets or exceeds profit targets. Striving to consistently exceed client expectations without increasing underlying delivery costs is where companies can differentiate from their competitors.
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