A couple weeks ago, Paul Borawski, CEO of ASQ, shared with us his conversations with Dr. J.J. Irani. Dr. Irani is a senior executive in the Tata Group, one of the most influential Indian firms in the world. Looking at their web site, I see that Tata is into a lot of different businesses, from heavy industry to cars and tractors to food processing to consulting services.
Dr. Irani stated that quality is part of the contract between supplier and user. Interesting that he reversed the normal order of Customer and Supplier. I wonder if that's due to East vs. West culture, or if he was making a point that quality must start with the provider of goods and services. The later is a different perspective from our (Western) perspective that the customer rules and the obligation is on the supplier to please that customer. Should the concept of quality - whatever that is - start with the supplier? Sort of like the baseball diamond in the movie Field of Dreams: "Build it and they will come."
Or maybe the order of the contract had no deeper meaning. But it caused me to think.
“I’m part of the ASQ Influential Voices program. While I receive a variety of quality resources as honorarium from ASQ in exchange for my commitment, the thoughts and opinions expressed on my blog are my own.”
3 comments:
Nice note ...
Mahatma Gandhi's quote is relevant in this regard - "A customer is the most important visitor on our premises, he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.” So, it for the provider to provide product or service that meets customer requirements as he is the person who is doing a favour to the provider.
With best wishes,
KRS
I would argue that the contract lies between the supplier and society.
Companies that survive and grow over time are those that maximise the 'value' they add to society, meeting cusomer's requirements is just a subset, the most important one most of the time, but not always.
I define 'Quality' as that which "maximises the value added to society resulting from the creation, use and disposal of goods and services at reducing Resource Intensity"
Derek,
You raise a very valid point. While Dr. Irini spoke of supplier and users, that is easy to expand that to supplier and society. Reminds me of the early work by the Japanese defining cost of quality as cost to society.
I am glad that Dr. Irini got both of us thinking!
Post a Comment