Second, quality products are free of deficiencies, meaning there’s no flaw in the design or production of the good that would prevent it from doing what it should do. Quality standards like the ISO family, IATF 16949, and GxP are essential for producing quality products. There are few better tools for controlling costs, streamlining compliance, and guaranteeing safe, performant products. Your customer tells you when they look for other suppliers, that there is waste in your offerings.

This approach starts from the premise that quality ‘lies in the eyes of the beholder’. Consumers have specific wants or needs and those products that best meet their preferences are those that they view as having the highest quality. Quality 4.0, at its core, names a shift in all aspects of quality–from culture to benchmarking to production to compliance–in the digital era.

What is Quality?

“Quality” is one of the most important concepts in manufacturing. But that doesn’t mean there’s agreement on what quality is. Ask 100 manufacturers and you’ll get 100 different definitions. Quality is the absence of waste in process and in our human performers. In the case of services, the measuring of quality may be more difficult.

Your Quality is solely determined by your customer. Continuous improvement of the people and processes in your authority is the step you must take to improve your company’s Quality. Once we understand that Quality is the absence of waste, we can see that there are two related approaches that we can employ to eliminate waste and, thus, improve the Quality of our systems. It should be no surprise that the ASQ suggests manufacturers add agile methodology to their lean programs. The overlaps between quality management and agile are many.

Conformance to Requirements is Not Enough

Companies can build interest and enthusiasm by using databases to remember customer preferences. Unlock access to hundreds of expert online courses and degrees from top universities and educators to gain accredited qualifications and professional CV-building certificates. Quality has been the subject of many and varied definitions. Each definition has both strengths and weaknesses in relation to criteria such as measurement and generalizability, managerial usefulness and consumer relevance. With the tools of Quality 4.0 at their disposal, manufacturers have an opportunity to serve their customers better than ever before.

This approach leads to a vertical or hierarchical ordering of quality. Products are raised according to the amount of ingredients or attributes that each possesses. However, an unambiguous ranking is possible only if the ingredients/attributes in question are considered preferable by all buyers. For one, new technologies have raised the ceiling in terms of repeatability, efficiency, and consistency in quality.

The Product-based Approach

In Juran’s definition, the quality of something depends on how someone will use it. Other definitions of quality tend to be similarly broad. In order to hold water as a concept, “quality” has to account for tremendous differences in manufactured products. Features of quality for, say, cutting-edge biologics, will differ from those for automobile parts. Quality standards for PCBs aren’t necessarily relevant for a food and beverage manufacturer.

Now, more than ever, manufacturers can leverage a dizzying range of tools throughout their QMS. 1.) Quality products satisfy their stated or implied needs. Even tried and true definitions (“Fitness for Use,” “Conformance to Requirements,” “When a thing does what it’s supposed to do”) can be maddeningly vague. They aren’t much help, however, where general definitions are concerned.

Definitions of Quality in Manufacturing and Why They Matter

Quality control techniques help to detect deviations from the specification. The user-based approach focuses exclusively on the customer in the determination of quality. The strength of this approach is that it allows the customer the say in defining quality. However, this strength may also be viewed as a weakness.

For example, while all the parts that the customer received met the spec, what if, in order to do so, we had to pay a crew a half shift of overtime to inspect? The additional cost, while not passed directly to the customer, still inflates our cost of doing business and, thus, according to the manufacturing-based definition of quality makes our offerings more expensive. The customer, because they bid out jobs, understands implicitly that our offering is inferior — because they can compare the terms and prices that others offer. Our highest value resources include our performers and our processes.

Simplify your quality management efforts with Tulip

Across all accepted definitions, quality is relative to a consumer, a product, and an outcome. At the same time, manufacturers do their best to scope the requirements of the consumer. A product that conforms to technical specifications but fails to fulfill the consumer’s need isn’t conforming to requirements. As a best practice, manufacturers will try to understand and eliminate the source of nonconformances whenever they arise. This is an elegant definition of quality because it captures how much quality is a careful negotiation of objects, people, and perceptions. Here, quality is always relative to a consumer—their needs, resources, and safety.

• First, quality products “satisfy their stated or implied needs,” meaning they do what they say they’ll do.
• By this, the authors suggest that quality must be defined by customer needs in product design (what are the products and services they want?), as well as by how well the product satisfies those needs.
• Each definition has both strengths and weaknesses in relation to criteria such as measurement and generalizability, managerial usefulness and consumer relevance.
• “Quality” is one of the most important concepts in manufacturing.
• Given this return to quality, now is a good time to revisit some of the canonical definitions of quality.
• They still have a lot to teach us about quality initiatives in the present, and where they might go in the future.

As you may realize in the following, quality has many facets and is more complex than it seems. Second, the shift toward agile manufacturing has brought new attention to end-to-end product development. As all of these definitions of quality argue, quality starts with product design and continues through use by the consumer.

Definitions of Product Quality – Different Approaches to Quality

The security system for this website has been triggered. Completing the challenge below proves you are a human and gives you temporary access. Through __________________ marketing statisticians can extract useful information about individuals, trends, and segments from the mass of data. In the previous step, we identified quality as one of the four elements of customer value, which we’ll now explore further. Buyers, in effect, use price as an index of quality as well as an index of the sacrifice that is made in purchasing it. Of course, price does not always reflect quality.