The meaning for the term quality has developed
over time. Various interpretations are given below:
"Conformance to requirements". The difficulty with this is that the
requirements may not fully represent customer expectations; Crosby treats
this as a separate problem.
A two-dimensional model of quality. The quality has two dimensions:
"must-be quality" and "attractive quality". The former is near to the
"fitness for use" and the latter is what the customer would love, but
has not yet thought about.
Costs go down and productivity goes up, as improvement of quality is
accomplished by better management of design, engineering, testing and
by improvement of processes. Better quality at lower price has a chance
to capture a market. Cutting costs without improvement of quality is
futile.
"The loss a product imposes
on society after it is shipped". Taguchi's definition of quality is
based on a more comprehensive view of the production system.
Energy quality, associated with both the energy engineering of industrial
systems and the qualitative differences in the trophic levels of an
ecosystem.
One key distinction to make is there are two common applications of
the term Quality as form of activity or function within a business.
One is Quality Assurance
which is the "prevention of defects", such as the deployment of a Quality
Management System and preventative activities like FMEA. The other is
Quality Control which is the "detection of defects", most commonly associated
with testing which takes place within a Quality Management System typically
referred to as Verification and Validation.
American Society for Quality Source: "a subjective term for which each
person has his or her own definition. In technical usage, quality can
have two meanings:
the characteristics of a product or service that bear on its ability
to satisfy stated or implied needs.
a product or service free of deficiencies."
The quality of a product
or service refers to the perception of the degree to which the product
or service meets the customer's expectations. Quality has no specific
meaning unless related to a specific function and/or object. Quality
is a perceptual, conditional and somewhat subjective attribute.
In the manufacturing industry it is commonly stated that “Quality drives
productivity”. Improved productivity is a source of greater revenues,
employment opportunities and technological advances. Most discussions
of quality refer to a finished part, wherever it is in the process.
Inspection, which is what quality insurance usually means, is historical,
since the work is done. The best way to think about quality is in process
control. If the process is under control, inspection is not necessary.
However, there is one characteristic
of modern quality that is universal. In the past, when we tried to improve
quality, typically defined as producing fewer defective parts, we did
so at the expense of increased cost, increased task time, longer cycle
time, etc. We could not get fewer defective parts and lower cost and
shorter cycle times, and so on.
However, when modern quality
techniques are applied correctly to business, engineering, manufacturing
or assembly processes, all aspects of quality - customer satisfaction
and fewer defects/errors and cycle time and task time/productivity and
total cost, etc.- must all improve or, if one of these aspects does
not improve, it must at least stay stable and not decline. So modern
quality has the characteristic that it creates AND-based benefits, not
OR-based benefits.
The most progressive view
of quality is that it defined entirely by the customer or end user and
is based upon that person's evaluation of his or her entire customer
experience. The customer experience is the aggregate of all the touch
points that customers have with the company's product and services,
and is by definition a combination of these. For example, any time one
buys a product one forms an impression based on how it was sold, how
it was delivered, how it performed, how well it was supported etc.
