Quality is fundamental for the well-being of any company and is an economic argument. Excellent and bespoke quality creates and nurtures a brand, good quality sustains an organization, and poor quality usually kills one. The premise of Quality is an enabler for both top-line growth and operating margin improvement, and in supporting sustainability. How may you ask: excellent products sell excellently; excellent quality processes perform at very high operating levels with reduced risks, defects, and waste, leading to lesser levels of resource consumption.
Technology is at a point where all of us have experienced its rapid rate of change – both growth and innovation. Twenty five years ago we had to use main-frame word processors (remember GML?); today almost anything we can think of, we can possibly do or try to do with the technology at our disposal. And in business, we have a tremendous array of computing tools and assets at our disposal to attack and disrupt a business problem, disrupt a market, or create new ones. We can use the technology available today, to better understand and design customer focused product or service requirements, use it to embed quality characteristics, enable superior manufacturability and serviceability, and provide near real-time product or service performance reports for iterative or drastic improvements. Think about a simple scenario of networked machine tools outputting process data for analysis and process control. This information can then be compared to the product requirements. Or about 3D printing and its ability to reduce the total product realization cycle-time – a nascent disruptive technology. Or the extensive use of business systems, such as, ERP, CRM etc., quite established, but often needing integration.
The Customer is at the heart of the enterprise whose sole role is to serve the customer and not the other way around. Customer intelligence is the ability to understand met and unmet desires and satisfaction with a product or service experience. This can be accrued in various ways: customer comments, social media messages, POS information, CRM systems etc. The challenge is to assimilate the various feeds into cogent, actionable information. For example, all customer emails can be parsed using text mining to keywords and tagged to product or service quality. If a customer purchases a leather belt and the “buckle cracks” complaints start arriving, then text mining can be used to quickly identify the magnitude of the problem, determine inventory, and investigate root causes for immediate corrective action. Customer intelligence may also force thinking about what the customer doesn’t know they desire. Providing this creates disruption and a new market as well.
So how does all of this tie together? This is a virtuous cycle. One can start considering each attribute – Quality, Technology, or Customer Intelligence – separately, but the innovation or disruption will occur as they are integrated. For example, one can start incrementally with the basics of quality – root cause analysis, SPC, etc. – and improve processes and products. On the other hand, integrating this with customer intelligence and technology will enable a leap forward by anticipating potential product design, process or service risks with nimble remediation. This will relieve resources and provide additional capacity because defects and waste requiring costly rework will be reduced or eliminated. Or how about creating an integrated environment where a customer can virtually fit a ring or stack different ones together and personalize the order with all quality criteria being specified downstream? Or a virtual device taking the essential suit measurements for a personalized order? Inherent in all of this is a coupling of process and quality requirements and this is possible using today’s technology.
What do you think?