CHAPTER 1 GOWER HANDBOOK 14/5/03 9:59 am Page 3

1 The
CHAPTER

Quality Concept and

Objectives
Frank Price*

Frank Price, one of the major contributors to shaping the way we think about quality, is
sadly no longer with us. Frank wrote the following chapter over ten years ago, yet it is still
as fresh and thought-provoking now as it was then, clearly outlining some of the
fundamental issues that the quality management profession has to address.

Quality: The latest buzzword?

‘Quality’: the word itself must have been used more in the last ten years than in the
preceding ten centuries, yet the more we hear it the more confusing its meaning seems to
become.
At one time the word was defined as ‘conformance to specification’, until it was realized
that specifications sometimes do not exactly and explicitly match a particular customer
need and that, though some article or service might indeed meet its specification, it still
failed to result in customer satisfaction. So the operational definition of quality evolved, in
the light of this potential incongruity, into ‘meeting the customers’ expectations’. This
seems to be as useful a definition as any, provided that the ‘customers’ expectations’ which
are supposed to be met are clearly and unambiguously understood by the one who sets out
to meet them and so provide the ‘quality’. This is not always the case.
This definition has undergone further honing into: ‘Quality is the supplying of goods
which do not come back, to customers who do.’ Although there is a certain slickness about
this definition, it does embody a commercial truism, but it depends upon actually achieving
perceived quality requirements, with consistency and regularity; this is not easy.
The quality function is an information-gathering service: from the mass of data which
is available in every production process and every service activity in the complex world of
commerce, quality extracts that which is most meaningful from that which is less so, and
by analysis of such process data sets out to control the future behaviour of the process
towards even greater customer satisfaction – towards better and better quality. Because all
modern business systems generate such colossal amounts of data, quality makes use of the
mathematics of big numbers – statistical methods – to distill useful meaning from the
daunting mega-heaps of data. So the belief has arisen that quality is little more than applied
statistics; this is on a par with averring that Chippendale furniture-making is little more

*Copyright of this chapter remains with the estate of the author.

CHAPTER 1 GOWER HANDBOOK 14/5/03 9:59 am Page 4

4 Part 1: Plan

than the applying of chisels to wood. Quality makes use of statistical thinking purely as a
tool of convenience, because there is no other tool as appropriate to the task as that
provided by mathematical statistics. This tends to put people off: memories of the blank
incomprehension occasioned by the algebra of schooldays shroud the subject in veils of
mystery. It all seems too complicated, and best left to the specialist practitioners who have
mastered its mysteries. Often these ‘experts’ themselves foster this mystification by speaking
in their own esoteric tongue which is unintelligible to the rest of us. This leads us to ask
what has all this fancy mathematics to do with quality in the workaday world, to which the
answer is ‘not much’. Maybe this is one of the reasons why quality used to be a despised
discipline done by despised people, whereas nowadays, thanks in large measure to Japan on
the one hand and the Ford Motor Company’s quality training initiative on the other, quality
is a highly respected discipline. Done by despised people.
This is one of the reasons why we in the West are, generally speaking, not as smart at
quality as we could be – it is still looked upon in the corporate culture as a low-status activity
of sufficient unimportance to be entrusted to low-calibre people, to those unsuited to the
more rewarding and demanding jobs of financial jiggery-pokery or marketing
manipulativeness. This statement is not mere opinion; it is borne out by the most cursory
survey of the job advertisements in the ‘quality’ newspapers: see which jobs are held in
highest esteem as measured by salaries offered, note where quality comes in the pecking
order. In these ‘quality’ newspapers the prestigious positions (financial management being
the most highly regarded, presumably because it is assumed that anybody who can count
money correctly can also earn it for the company – a belief with no basis in reality) offer the
highest pay, plus a ‘quality’ motor car. Note the misuse of language here. What is a ‘quality’
car? One which fulfils its intended purpose. So, to an itinerant window-cleaner, a fuel-thrifty
Reliant Robin van with a roof-rack to carry ladders is a ‘quality’ car. To a successful rag-and-
bone gatherer who is privately ashamed of his scavenging way of life, such a vehicle would
demean his self-image, so he buys a Rolls-Royce to park on the gravel drive in front of his
mansion. His is a different ‘intended purpose’ from the window-cleaner’s.
Quality is fitness for purpose; it has nothing whatever to do with status, or grade, or
class. Yet this wrong interpretation of the word is an endlessly recurring source of trouble,
it causes so many misunderstandings. ‘We cannot afford the luxury of quality’, decrees the
boss of a small outfit making modest earthenware drinking mugs. ‘We are not at the
Wedgwood or china porcelain end of the business.’ No, but whoever buys the mugs expects
them to hold the tea without leaking, expects them to fulfil their intended purpose –
expects, in a word, quality.
Perhaps another of the reasons why we in the West are still not quite as smart about
quality as we could be lies in the paradox that when it is present, quality is, in fact, invisible.
What do we mean by that, invisible? Consider the following paraphrasing of a famous
advertising jingle:

A million housewives every day open a can … and throw it away!

After having emptied its contents of baked beans into the saucepan, of course. In the act of
throwing the emptied can away without a second thought, these housewives are collectively
paying a daily million tributes to the quality of the tin can which brought them something
to go with their breakfast bacon – by ignoring it. The quality of these cans (which is to say
the way they fulfil their intended purpose) is so superlatively good that it may safely be
CHAPTER 1 GOWER HANDBOOK 14/5/03 9:59 am Page 5

The Quality Concept and Objectives 5

taken for granted – not once, not twice, but a million times a day. Now that is real quality!
An invisible input. Achieved by a succession of invisible people, employed in the once-
despised but lately respected calling of quality control, right back up the supply chain which
ends when the emptied can is tossed absent-mindedly into the garbage bin. Achieved by the
men and women in the cannery who control torrents of output streaming along the
production lines at hundreds of cans per minute. At these vast output rates it is not possible
to make a little mistake. So, very few mistakes are made. Achieved by their counterparts in
the can-making plant; by those upstream in the tinplate mill; by those further back in the
steel casting and rolling mill … an unremitting application of statistical method and quality
skill which culminates in an emptied can, its purpose fulfilled, being casually tossed onto
the rubbish dump – by the million, and rarely does a dud appear. (When did you last see a
can with its ends domed-out, blown?) The rare defectives are not counted even in parts per
million; they occur as one per several million, if at all.
To sum up the foregoing:

Quality is: Giving the customer what he wants today,

at a price he is pleased to pay,
at a cost we can contain,
again, and again,and again,
and giving him something even better tomorrow.
Quality is: The degree of congruence between expectation and realization.

Or, to put this into plainer words:

The matching of what you wanted with what you got.
Expectation versus fulfilment.

Quality is: Invisible when it is good,

Impossible to ignore when it is bad.
An invisible input.

Quality is: NOT mathematical statistics.

Quality is: The application of simple statistical method.
Quality is: NOT status, grade or class.

Quality: Is it important?
Important? The answer to this question depends, as answers so often do, on the questioner’s
standpoint. Quality is relative. It is to a large extent dependent on economics, on the
inexorable law of supply and demand. Whenever there is an excess of money pursuing a
shortage of goods or services to spend it on, quality is of secondary importance to mere
availability.
In a free market economy a famine of consumer goods is not permitted to exist for very
long; market forces, in the form of entrepreneurial capitalism, respond to the imbalance of too
much cash chasing too few goods. The balance is redressed. Soon there is an abundance of
goods available to sop up the cash in the economy. The system overbalances in the other
direction, and an excess of goods bloats the market, rival brands competing for the consumers’
CHAPTER 1 GOWER HANDBOOK 14/5/03 9:59 am Page 6

6 Part 1: Plan

spending power. Now quality, which mattered not at all when things were scarce, matters
more than anything else now they are plentiful. So quality is a function of supply, once sellers’
markets have given way to buyers’. Of the three factors governing purchasing decisions – price,
service and quality – at a time when goods were scarce, service was the be-all and end-all,
‘make it … sell it’ was the order of the day. This is how things used to be in the halcyon days
of Western manufacturing, before a quality revolution exploded out of the East to shatter
complacency for evermore. As soon as goods became plentiful, price became the arbiter, but
price wars are too costly to support for very long, so quality inevitably becomes the primary
purchasing determinant, to use the language of the buying officer. This fact is borne out by
formal research, as well as by general observation and historical awareness.
This economic context emphasizing the importance of quality, as it is used as a
marketing competitive edge external to the manufacturing (or servicing) enterprise, is
symmetrically balanced by an equal stress on the economics of quality within the
enterprise. Quality is, as well as an information-gathering agency, a discipline of thrift, a
doctrine of frugality in the use of available resources.
Resources … what are the resources at the disposal of the manufacturer? There are four –
raw materials, machinery, time and people. The ‘trick’ of manufacturing management is to
make the best use of time and machinery, through the capabilities (or, as they are called these
days, ‘competencies’) of people, in order to transform 100 per cent of the bought-in raw
materials into saleable finished goods. Sounds simple enough. It is. But it is not easy. This
conversion ratio – the proportion of raw materials entering the plant which eventually
departs from the plant as finished goods (as opposed to scrap or returned products) – is a valid
measure of the effectiveness of management. This must be why a good many companies are
unable to quote it. The maximization of this conversion ratio is the job of quality.
You might at this point choose to step into that ancient and cloying swamp of semantics
by asking that hoary old conundrum, ‘Who is responsible for quality?’ and then going on to
suggest that the quality function cannot be ‘responsible’ for quality, since its practitioners
do no more than measure it. You might then go on to suggest, as so many others before you
have suggested, that since quality is not the responsibility of quality, it must therefore be
the responsibility of production. Your thinking, if you have pursued this route, is now well
and truly bogged down in the mire of meanings. You are now committed to a silly sectarian
squabble about who is responsible for quality, and it will go on and on and you will never
escape the swamp. Save your breath. It is the process which is responsible for quality. The job
of the people in the quality department is to measure the capability of the process, to
balance the see-saw on one end of which sit the customers’ needs, while on the other is
perched the measured capability of the process to meet those needs. The ‘responsibility’ for
quality belongs to the process and therefore to those in whose stewardship the entire
process of wealth-generation rests, whether they are called ‘production’ or ‘quality’ or
whatever. They are collectively the custodians of the resources whose purpose is the
generating of wealth by the adding of value, through the activity called ‘work’.
Work, from an economic standpoint, is identifiable as one of two kinds:

• work which adds value

• work which adds cost.

To demonstrate this crucial difference, consider (using the following example) what research
in the UK shows to be typical of manufacturing performance.
CHAPTER 1 GOWER HANDBOOK 14/5/03 9:59 am Page 7

The Quality Concept and Objectives 7

A hypothetical manufacturer buys £100’s worth of components – his ‘raw materials’. He

processes them through his lathes and his grinders to turn them into saleable goods. He has
done work which adds value. Their value is now £200. Well, it would be, but for the
distressing discovery that 30 per cent of the finished goods are incorrect to specification, so
these are rejected to be reworked. So only £70’s worth of the original lot has achieved
saleable status. It now has a value of £140. The remaining components, costing £30 but now
having a nominal value of £60, are consigned to rework. This costs money in machine time
and wages. This work is now adding cost. If all are salvaged, their value will still be £60, but
their cost will be considerably higher. This would be a bad enough state of affairs, but there
is worse: half of the 30 per cent reworked components are found to be irredeemably
defective after the rework costs have been added. These are now scrapped. Money is now
pouring down the plug-hole. All hope of any profit is lost. Company cash is added to that
Danegeld which collective quality incompetence extorts from British manufacturing
industry, every year to the tune of a staggering figure somewhere between £10 000 million
and £20 000 million. These are statistical estimates of the awful reality; they are figures of
unimpeachable pedigree, elicited by university research (Lockyer and Oakland, Bradford
UMC).
The hypothetical company (Hypothetical? Don’t you believe it!) which is the subject of
this tale of woe might argue: ‘So what! It is our money we are losing.’ True, true yet false; it
is ultimately the nation’s wealth they are squandering through their wasteful
mismanagement of the resources that society entrusts to their stewardship. Their private loss
is our public loss in their frittering away of irreplaceable resources. Perhaps they seek to
excuse their inexcusable misconduct by citing another of the convenient managerial cop-
outs of our times and claiming ‘you cannot have quality and quantity’. Again they are
wrong. The truth is:

The higher the quality, the less it costs.

This is very obvious, when you think about it. Making duds sops up just as much machine
capacity as making OK output does; thus to improve quality is to bring more productive
capacity into profitable employment. You would wonder why it is necessary to state such an
obvious truth. Alas, it is often necessary to do so.
So this thing we call quality – which is about satisfying the needs of the customer and
doing so at an economic cost – is a subject well worthy of consideration at the highest level.
Quality, used for a generation and more by Japan as a key element of manufacturing and
marketing strategy, offers us the chance to create a strong competitive edge. Quality, once
the Cinderella of the organization, is about to become a royal bride. Unless we get it wrong,
and it becomes just another ugly sister instead. So how do we get it right?

Quality: Leadership through commitment

There is an old Chinese benediction which goes ‘May you be so fortunate as to live in
uninteresting times.’ The idea of it is, one supposes, that the even tenor of life should never
be upset by the arrival of the unexpected. There must be no surprises. It is a not
inappropriate tenet of faith for anyone engaged in the supply of goods or services of
specified quality – never disturb the equanimity of the customer by surprising him, especially
CHAPTER 1 GOWER HANDBOOK 14/5/03 9:59 am Page 8

8 Part 1: Plan

by making a delivery of substandard output. This is not to confuse ‘uninteresting’ with

‘boring’. There is no boredom to be found in consistently delivering high-quality product,
but ‘interest’ – even shock – is generated by the delivery of the rejectable. Like the consumer
who disposes of the empty can with utter disinterest (she would only find it of interest if it
had failed in its purpose), the consumer has no wish to find your product ‘interesting’
because it is contaminated with troublesome duds. After all, what is it that you are really
selling?
This is not a trivial question; it is central to the whole commercial thrust. Elizabeth
Arden, of cosmetics fame, asked and answered this question; when someone made the
observation, ‘Ah, Miss Arden, I see you are selling cosmetics’, she is said to have replied: ‘No
I am not selling cosmetics, I am selling the hope of beauty.’ There is a world of difference.
What is the can manufacturer selling to the cannery which puts the beans into the cans
which are bought by a million consumers? Empty tin cans? Ends to be seamed onto the cans
once they are filled? No, it is selling the certitude of trouble-free running to the canner who
will use this product at the rate of over a thousand a minute. It is selling peace of mind. It is
selling ‘uninteresting times’.
This notion might be pushed even further by suggesting that it is in the interest of
manufacturers to attend to all the interesting quality requirements of their product, in order
to deprive their customers of the interesting discovery that they are not to specification.
Customers will have enough problems controlling their own quality and will feel
completely disinclined to add to their burden by accepting yours. Customers are people, and
after all, in our mechanistic scheme of things people are generally perceived to be nuisances;
this is a legacy of our rationalist and scientific culture. It is the motivation behind the
millennial dream of the ‘workerless factory’ from which people have been exiled by
automation. Trouble is, though, that the achieving and sustaining of high process and
product quality is the direct result of the application of creativity, imagination, analysis,
synthesis, willpower – people things. This is where quality leadership has its roots, in the
vision of quality which is the essential precursor of its attainment.
This is not to suggest that there is no place for managerial systems and advancing
technology. These are essential. But on their own they cannot be enough. The best system
of quality management, ISO 9000, is a fine system. But that is all it is – a system, a
scaffolding within which people must transform the pile of bricks it embraces into a house.
Any system is all form and no content. The latter must be supplied by people. Many
managers set great store by systems, and it is easy to over-systematize, to fall into the trap
of assuming that because there is a system for dealing with every eventuality then every
eventuality will be dealt with; disappointment and frustration sometimes ensue. Systems
sometimes help us to generate the right answers to the wrong questions, whereas quality is
about asking the right questions. Systems are concerned with administration; quality is to do
with inspiration. This is the most important gift the quality function can make to the
organization: a vision of success to which it is feasible to aspire, to say ‘this is where we are
aiming, this is our strategic goal’; and then to provide the means of achieving it, the
techniques of quality, saying ‘this is how we get there’. This is the tactical support.
In this way the quality function will finally free itself from the stigma of being a despised
discipline. It will have earned respect. And quality, of world-class leadership, is achieved
through education, which is what this handbook is all about.
CHAPTER 1 GOWER HANDBOOK 14/5/03 9:59 am Page 9

The Quality Concept and Objectives 9

Further reading
Price, Frank, Right First Time, Gower, Aldershot, 1984.
Price, Frank, Right Every Time, Gower, Aldershot, 1990.