Why Should Quality Stop at the Factory Gate?

The next quality frontier: Improving promises

Bio

PIVOT Management Consultants

During a recent visit to a brewery in Dublin, I was stopped by one statement displayed on the tour: “The quality of our advertising must be equal to the quality of our beer.”

It was intended as branding. But it pointed to something most organizations quietly overlook: They assume quality begins when production begins.

That assumption is wrong.

In most systems, the most expensive defects are created before anything is produced; they’re created when a promise is made. And once made, that promise becomes the system constraint to which everything else must adapt.

Most quality problems start before we look

After more than three decades working in quality systems, I’ve become convinced of something simple: We define the system too late.

We’re very good at controlling what happens after requirements are fixed—manufacturing, delivery, service recovery, corrective action.

But by then, the system has already committed to something. The more important question isn’t whether we delivered correctly. It’s whether we should have made that promise in the first place. Customers don’t experience our functions. They experience a single flow:

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Comments

Thought provoking

A more general version of your model would be:

Expectation -> Experience -> Judgment (-> Expectation)

Expectations come from a lot of places, and typically with discussions of quality, we focus on those expectations that come from prior experience with the product. The exact shade of some colour needs to be consistent, even if it doesn't affect the product's fitness for use, because it affects the experience of someone who will see more than one instance of the product. We minimise variation because the product needs to be what it is (and not something else) for the customer. If the customer was only ever going to see one instance of the product, we could allow a lot of unimportant things to vary, but then all the things we take for granted about experiences driving expectations go out the window, because their expectations are created entirely in their imagination.

In this article, you focus on the scenario where the gestalt of what the product is cannot be established through experience with the product. I've not seen advertising put under the purview of quality like this before, but I think it's completely fitting. It's also a lot more abstract and complicated than dealing with expectations that are created through experience, because you have to imagine what the customer is imagining, rather than what the customer has experienced. This also raises questions of ethics too; is it enough just to be responsible for what you said in advertising your product, or do you need to be responsible to imagine what picture your words paint in the customers' imaginations and anticipate which gaps in your words are being filled in with things that you didn't say, but which still establish expectations that can make or break an experience?

There's also the aspect of how expectations for your product are derived from experiences with other products that have nothing to do with you; if you're painting a picture for someone, you'd surely like to know what image was already on the canvas to begin with.

I dig it.

UPDATE

it is important for people working from mobile connection in odd times