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I believe that most manufacturers have mistakenly focused on initial quality and reducing cost and cycle time during the production and delivery cycle. This has come at the expense of reliability.
Customers buy for the following reasons, listed by top priority: • Features • Cost • Availability • Quality
Customers come back based on: • Reliability • Function • Cost • Availability
A customer puts quality last when making a purchase because quality is generally good no matter who the supplier is. In the same plant, the same people make Toyota and General Motors cars. Quality isn’t the problem; yes, there are “lemons” out there, but the top half-dozen name brands do a good job of producing initial quality. Why, then, have Ford and GM given way to Toyota as the No. 1 producer? Because Toyota is the best at producing reliability.
Let me give you some examples. The Toyota Yaris hatchback has 81-percent fewer problems during the first five years of ownership than the average car, while the Pontiac Solstice has 234-percent more problems than the average car.
We’ve heard it before: “______ won’t be around long. It’s the flavor of the month.” Fill in the blank with the latest management fad: zero defects, quality circles, SPC, TQM, systems thinking, balanced scorecards, reengineering, and most recently, Six Sigma and lean. What exactly is meant by tagging something the flavor of the month (FOM)? Should practitioners even care when their special initiative is the target of this unwelcome label?
Originally, of course, the FOM was a marketing promotion for Baskin-Robbins. It still is. December’s FOM was, appropriately, Egg Nog. But who really cares what last month’s FOM was? It’s yesterday’s news. This is one of the defining properties of the label. It’s here today, gone tomorrow. Lots of hype, enthusiasm, and fanfare. Then… nothing.
