Quality is never an accident

most pertinent issues surrounding it is to build quality in service delivery.
Quality is now expected by consumers and is ceasing to be a differentiation strategy.
You might have come across such lines, only differing in semantics “. . . we have maintained a reputation of supplying innovative high quality material . . .” in company profiles as a corporate objective but the question is, is quality subjective?
Does quality vary with circumstances surrounding the economics that you find yourself as a business?
Do we still have the same perception and attitude towards quality that we had more than 10 years ago in a vibrant Zimbabwean economy?
Do we as a nation have a standard/yardstick that we can measure for quality — inadvertently?
This leads us to the effectiveness of the country’s sole quality control body, the Standards Association of Zimbabwe.
The new definition of quality focuses on achieving value entitlement. It defines quality as a state in which value entitlement is realised for the customer and provider in every aspect of the business relationship.
Value represents economic worth, practical utility and availability for both the customer and the company that creates the product or service.
Value entitlement for the customer means — a rightful level of expectation to buy high-quality products at the lowest possible cost.
For the provider it is a rightful level of expectation to produce quality products at the highest possible profit.
Quality is a deliberate process of co-ordinated built-in efficient systems.
By quality, we are not only looking at the end product but efficiency of the product as well. 
There are various campaigns going around that are designed amongst other things to resuscitate the production and encourage consumption of local products compared to foreign alternatives.
I totally agree with them that “buying local must not be an excuse for mediocrity,                   substandard offerings or clever protectionism”.
Quality in mobile devices, and in smart-tech computing and communications spheres, often triggers strong commentary from the supply side to the consumer experience.
Does quality spur or impede innovation in 2012 and beyond?
Design and device makers must deliver the quality promise of product to consumers in challenging situations — such as when the supply chain or the network service companies experience failure modes.
Culture of quality
Reporting and promoting success is a critical part of the culture of quality. I once dealt with a hotelier who told me in no uncertain terms that they adhere to the “zero defects” perspective.
There was a general outcry at one of the Tourism Indabas on the passive mentality that has gripped us as Zimbabweans we sometimes take in “the good, the bad and the ugly”.
One wonders why we seem to go back to vendors/suppliers that fail us? Options must be available for the customer to choose from, the monopolistic position is very retrogressive in a developing economy.
Promote culture of quality
Is it futile to “sell” quality to an organisation that doesn’t understand the intrinsic value of quality.
Quality can’t be sold but organisations can create a quality culture. There are companies that hire a lot of people, and spend a lot of time training them. 
The general dogma in recent decades has been that in order to compete on price, you need to keep labour costs down — hiring as few workers as you can get away with and paying them as little as possible.
Although leanness is generally a good thing in business, too much cost cutting turns out to be a bad strategy, not only for workers and customers but also for businesses themselves
Health sector
Quality improvement should be a goal in all health institutions. Routine clinical decision-making has a substantial effect on quality.
Reports I came across in the media on quality problems have pointed to missed or delayed diagnoses, inappropriate treatments, physicians’ behaviour, inadequate knowledge.
Many patients have been known to die as a result of an error in diagnosis or inadequate evaluation or treatment in a patient with an advanced end-stage disease.
To counter these problems, classification of all these quality problems must be identified then analysed separately.
Some have embarked on training to discuss the issues of patient management, administrative problems and utilisation of resources.
In our local hospitals systems problems such as busy schedules must be deal with.
How do we distinguish the good from the bad
There is need to support locally produced campaigns have come up to put pressure on industry to maintain the high standard of our local products.
Economic theory suggests that this adverse selection has made Zimbabwe a fertile ground for the dumping of cheaper Chinese products.
What is important is to consider the quality of the two products, are there features that differentiate the good from the bad.
As business, we must ensure that our dimensions of quality align with customer priorities especially when it is likely that trade-off decisions will be made at various points in design and production.
We must have an inclination towards quality engineering on ensuring that a product is made to anticipate the harsh operating conditions, which it will be exposed to from manufacturing.
Determinants of quality
One must ensure that the product they are introducing into the market satisfies the following basic prerequisites for a quality product to a customer — the quality of design which involves the specific characteristics’ of a product/service such as size, shape, location. Vehicles on the market can differ in size, appearance, comfort, roominess and fuel consumption.
Ease of use is an important aspect — what would be the use of buying a mobile phone with complicated log-in features. The quality of a product is also determined through the way a company handles its after sales services — recently a milk manufacturing company pulled its product from the market after a health hazard alert.
The quality of conformance also comes in as products must be made with design and intent.
Costs of quality
Like anything else in business, quality has a cost attached to it. It could be a quality control cost or quality failure cost.
The important thing is that the external failure costs; that include defective products or poor service that goes undetected by the producer; are more costly than internal failure costs on a per unit basis. They result in replacement, payments to customers, discounts used to offset the inferior quality, warranty work, loss of customer good will and to some extends litigation. Progressive companies always design quality into their processes and systems.
Total Quality Management (TQM)
Some companies have gone on to expand the traditional view of quality and adopt the modern Total Quality Management.
It involves everyone in an organisation in a continual effort to improve quality and achieve customer satisfaction. TQM focuses on encouraging a continuous flow of incremental improvements from the bottom of the organization’s hierarchy.
It is not a complete solution formula as viewed by many, there must be a lasting commitment to the process of continuous improvement.
Till next week, remember “Quality is never an accident, it is always a result of intelligent effort” (John Ruskin).