Juran defined as ―Quality is fitness for use‖. ―The Quality of a product or service is the fitness of that product or service for meeting or exceeding its intended use as required by the customer.‖
Dimensions of quality
- Performance – How well the product or service performs the customers intended use. E.g.the speed of a computer.
- Features- the special characteristics that appeal to customers e.g. power seats on a car.
- Reliability- the likelihood of breakdowns, malfunctions and the need for repairs.
- Serviceability – the speed, cost, and convenience of repairs and maintenance
- Durability– the effects on human sense- the look, feel, taste, smell or sound.
- Customer service- the treatment received by customers before, doing and after sale.
- How well product protects users before during and after use. Crosby defined as ―Quality is conformance to requirement or specifications
Fundamental Factors Affecting Quality
The nine fundamental factors (9 M‘s), which are affecting the quality of products and services, are: markets, money, management, men, motivation, materials, machines and mechanization. Modern information methods and mounting product requirements.
1. Market: Because of technology advancement, we could see many new products to satisfy customer wants. At the same time, the customer wants are also changing dynamically. So, it is the role of companies to identify needs and then meet it with existing technologies or by developing new technologies.
2. Money: The increased global competition necessitates huge outlays for new equipment‘s and process. This should be rewarded by improved productivity. This is possible by minimizing quality costs associated with the maintenance and improvements of quality level.
3. Management: Because of the increased complex structure of business organization, the quality related responsibilities lie with persons at different levels in the organization.
4. Men: The rapid growth in technical knowledge leads to development of human resource with different specialization. This necessitates some groups like, system engineering group to integrate the idea of full specialization.
5. Motivation: If we fix the responsibility of achieving quality with each individual in the organization with proper motivation techniques, there will not be any problem in producing the designed quality products.
6. Materials: Selection of proper materials to meet the desired tolerance limit is also an important consideration. Quality attributes like, surface finish, strength, diameter etc., can be obtained by proper selection of material.
7. Machines and mechanization: In order to have quality products which will lead to higher productivity of any organization, we need to use advanced machines and mechanize various operations.
8. Modern information methods: The modern information methods help in storing and retrieving needed data for manufacturing, marketing and servicing.
9. Mounting product requirements: Product diversification to meet customers taste leads to intricacy in design, manufacturing and quality standards. Hence, companies should plan adequate system to tackle all these requirements.
The process through which the standards are established and met with standards is called control. This process consists of observing our activity performance, comparing the performance with some standard and then taking action if the observed performance is significantly too different from the standards.
The control process involves a universal sequence of steps as follows:
1. Choose the control object
2. Choose a unit of measure
3. Set the standard value
4. Choose a sensing device which can measure
5. Measure actual performance
6. Interpret the difference between actual and standard
7. Taking action.
Need for Controlling Quality
In the absence of quality, the following will result:
1. No yardstick for comparing the quality of goods/services.
2. Difficulty in maintaining consistency in quality.
3. Dissatisfied customers due to increased maintenance and operating costs of products/services.
4. Increased rework cost while manufacturing products/providing services.
5. Reduced life time of the products/services.
6. Reduced flexibility with respect to usage of standard spare parts.
7. Hence, controlling quality is an essential activity.
