W
hen I started working on this story, I had an idea in mind. Based on a report that Quality Digest Daily ran in October, “Shifts in Consumer Spending and Saving to Usher in a New Economic Era,” I wanted to investigate whether less consumer spending would, in some way, pose an opportunity for companies to focus more on quality. My initial thought was that with money being tighter, consumers would tend to give more importance to the quality of products and services. In other words, would an era of less spending mean a preference for quality over price?
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In addition, as the economy slowly recovers, would consumers become a lot more aware of their past wasteful spending, and thus begin to value high-quality over low-quality products and services?
With these questions in mind and with a blind optimistic outlook on what awaits the quality industry, I reached out to H. James Harrington, who has more than 45 years of experience in quality, reliability, and process improvement. As with any true quality guru, Harrington had a much broader view of the issue and refuted my ideas with powerful statements and simple explanations. “I have a tendency to look at the big picture, not at the trend of today,” Harrington told me. “Unfortunately, I see our quality professionals slipping backward, not moving forward as they should.”
Following is a question-and-answer session with Harrington. But before you read on, I urge you to think about your responsibility as a quality professional: What are you doing to change the future of quality products and services; and what are you, not your company or department, doing to improve the current state of the U.S. manufacturing industry?
Quality Digest Daily: Would you say there is a relationship between consumers wanting to spend less and a preference for quality over price?
H. James Harrington: When you are out of work, you are forced to spend less. When you have lost half your net value in the stock market, you want to spend less. When the value of your home is less than what you paid for it, even after you have been making payments on it for the last five years, you want to spend less. When you are maxed out on your credit card, you are forced to spend less.
That is the condition of the average population in the U.S. today. Adults are more concerned about their spending than they ever have been before. This is not true of young people; their spending is actually up, particularly in entertainment (e.g., concerts, CDs, and so forth).
It is obvious we are not selecting quality over price, as we are buying Chinese-made goods as a first preference because of their lower cost.
QDD: Do you think that after this economic downturn, consumer markets won’t be the same anymore? Are we entering a new era for the quality industry, where consumers are going to be a lot more aware of what they’re buying and consider aspects such as how “green” a company is, or whether it is “wasteful,” etc.?
HJH: I hope that the turnaround has taught us a lesson. There is still one even bigger turnaround coming when the outstanding credit card debt cost hits the fan. It will make the housing problem look like a small blip in our economy.
There will be a few people who will champion the cause and spend more money for a product that is manufactured by a green company, and the government will push green through tax breaks, and people will consider green when everything else is equal. The new focus for the quality industry is not green–it is reliability. This is the place where American organizations are losing the market and, as a result, don’t want to talk about it openly. Reliability has to be the quality professionals’ cause for the future, but you see almost no articles published on reliability or conference papers on reliability.
QDD: What is the state of the quality profession and quality professionals?
HJH: First, the quality professional does not think that quality is a profession. If we did, quality managers would not hire an engineer who was not a certified quality engineer or have a degree in quality engineering. In addition, the quality professional goes around saying, “Quality is everyone’s responsibility” and so have not made themselves responsible for the quality of the output from the organization.
We continuously state that we are out to eliminate our job[s]… we are doing a good job of making that a fact. The quality department is taking a back seat to projects that add real value. Some things like customer relationship management (CRM) and other IT systems have done more to improve quality than ISO 9001. If we keep doing things as we are, the financial department will take over all the audit activities, performing financial, quality, environmental, safety, and green audits. When this occurs, there will be little need for a quality function other than to have a name on the organization chart.
QDD: Do you think there is a link between quality and being a “green” or “sustainable” company?
HJH: Quality professionals have given up most of their value-added roles and are looking for some place to hang their hats. Green is just another way to direct their efforts in place of where it should be. Quality’s role should be to ensure that the output will perform for the total life cycle in a way that will always satisfy the customer. Green and environmental is a good thing to talk about and, if everything else is equal, they are considered by some customers. But, the real responsibility of the quality department is not to have all other things equal, but to have their organization’s output performance be so obviously better than the competition that there is no doubt of which product should be bought. Then green and environmental considerations will not be the dominant issue.
QDD: What do companies need to do to meet a growing “quality conscious” market (if that indeed exists)?
HJH: The quality department needs to focus more on setting the example of excellence in the way we work, run projects, and behave. We should be the benchmark for quality of our internal operations for the rest of the organization. We need to focus on the quality of design for products and services so that there is no need for problem solving. Our poor-quality cost system needs to take into consideration the cost that errors have on the customers. We need to become change agents, not statisticians, as Six Sigma is driving us to become. We need to measure the executive team’s behavior error rates and establish programs to see major improvement in this area. We are way behind in applying quality tools into the sales and marketing departments, yet they are the primary interface with the external customer and the consumer. The quality professionals need to expand their expertise in tools like behavioral modification and knowledge management.
There is so much we should be doing to prevent problems from occurring and improving service quality that we are not doing and should be doing. As a radical idea, how about applying quality and integrity to the way our Senate and Congress functions?
Comments
Six Sigma making us Statisticians?
This is a very interesting interview. I'd like to know more about Harrington's assertion that "Some things like customer relationship management (CRM) and other IT systems have done more to improve quality than ISO 9001."
I strongly agree that we should be change agents; should have been, all along. Somewhere along the line, that's been lost, as references to the Deming Philosophy and Juran have become fewer and farther between, and resistance to change (or at least, to the idea of being a "change agent") has become almost an ideology in business. I'm not so sure that Six Sigma has created statisticians; many of the Black Belts I've met are a result of Rule Four of the funnel (worker training worker).
My own feeling is that as long as Quality is seen as a function rather than as a system interacting with the larger system, and executives continue to practice Deming's Deadly Sins, we will continue to see programmatic, "small-q" initiatives rise while they are tried as a curiosity and fall (even if successful) as resistance overcomes them or the sponsoring managers move on.
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