Bill Troy, ASQ (American Society of Quality) CEO said in his last blog post “is Quality ambitious enough?” that quality was responsible for many of the things that make life better. I truly believe he is right, quality is the cure for the diseases of any organization (profit and non-profit, multinational or SME), to make them profitable. I even use quality tools at home, such as 5S to get everything organized.
As a passionate quality engineer sometimes it is difficult for me to understand others that do not think or do not appreciate quality as being the way for making a business more profitable or ensuring we don’t forget to pay our bills at home.
Facts show that people all around the world likes quality to be applied to their day-to-day. They like trains being on time, bills written for the right amount, toys and cars built with no flaws. But I believe that most of them are not aware that when things are right, they are usually due to some kind of quality thinking applied to them. Consultants are not the only ones that love quality: architectures, housewives, teachers, everybody loves it as well. Probably a nurse knows how to provide an excellent service to her patients, but she doesn’t know how to make the whole hospital as lean and cost efficient as possible and satisfy the customer at the same time. I recall a story my mother in-law used to tell me. As a great cooker, she used to sell cakes some time ago. The problem is that she went out of business because her cakes were so good, so high quality, that nobody was able to pay such a high price to make her business profitable enough.
And this is a common situation in many businesses. I have seen lots of cases where the product is excellent, but service is not, or the other way around. Sometimes both products and services are excellent, but costs are not properly looked after so the results are terrible.
What is it that entrepreneurs and SME owners do not know that could save their business?
They should know that quality thinking could be the key to put everything together and make their life better: making products right the first time, reducing costs, eliminating steps that don’t add value, training employees, standardizing best practices, developing training manuals, organizing paperwork. Quality could help owners and at the same time help their employees, their customers, investors and suppliers. But how would they know if they are so focused on running their business?
It’s our job as quality specialists to let them know that there are tools available for them to make his business profitable, no matter the size of the company or the kind of industry. Blogs, on-line marketing, videos and whatever tools are available should be used by each of us to make this knowledge public, and basically make it LEAN, I mean, make it SIMPLE. Are we able to walk the talk and start using lean or any other quality tool for our own job as quality professionals?
How would you use quality to make your own job more profitable?
Luciana Paulise
Founder Biztorming Training & Consulting
luciana.paulise@biztorming.com.ar
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