TABLE OF CONTENTS After studying this chapter, students should be able to describe:
what is meant by quality and why it is important;
quality systems and standards;
what is meant by the cost of quality;
types of quality regimes employed by business operations;
the purpose of statistical process control (SPC);
the philosophies of total quality management (TQM) and Six Sigma;
the features and benefits of just-in-time ( JIT).
When we discuss quality, we must immediately dispense with the common understanding of the word. When we mention quality in the operations function, we do not refer to any notions of luxury, superiority or premium. If we say, for example, that a Rolls Royce is a quality car, we usually mean that it is a premium car or a luxury car. It is, however, quite possible for an eastern European car or a budget Chinese moped to be of equal quality to the Rolls Royce when we use the word in its precise business context.
Some of the most noted thinkers in the field have described quality in respect to excellence or more accurately perceived excellence . Although quality means many things to different people, in general we can consider quality as meeting customer needs or expectations. Hence, strictly speaking, it is quite possible for a product which is designed to be in budget and which then meets the customer s low expectations to actually be a high-quality product. An example might be a cheap plastic disposable...
