Author : Vernon Stent
There are various factors to consider when buying a product, but the two main
areas must surely be price and quality.Price is easy - the only three options you have are up, down or same. That's
it. Quality is much more involved. Firstly we cannot judge or even quantify the
quality of a product if we don't have a yardstick. There are two ways to do this
and both have their place. Firstly, find an equivalent product sold by a rival
company and compare its attributes with your own product. Better still, obtain all
competing products and produce a checklist of each product's attributes,
comparing each with the other. Now add your own product to the mix and see where
it lands in the quality hierarchy.A second way of measuring quality is to produce a product specification (the
above comparison exercise could feed in to this). Most specifications
allow tolerances for certain attributes. A shirt's line of stitching may need to
be within a channel rather than in a perfect straight line, for instance. The
amount of glue seepage from a fibreboard box join may be allowable if no more
than 2 millimetres from the join. Certain attributes may have no tolerance at
all, especially when it comes to a critical function of the product (such as an
on/off switch on an electrical appliance). Health and safety aspects will
usually have no tolerance as will legal aspects. For instance, an incorrectly
wired mains plug will not be acceptable as will incorrect labelling of contents,
if this contravenes the law.Then you need to decide what to do if a product is outside the given
tolerances. If it is a food product, it may be sold off to a jobber or even
disposed of. If it is a factory-made product it may be sent back for
re-working. But what if the production manager is under pressure to get
goods out to the customer and the quality controller finds that it is out of
specification? There are a multitude of solutions ranging from "send it
back" to "ignore it". In between are various solutions such as
putting the monkey on the customer's shoulders: "you can have it now with
minor defects or you can wait until tomorrow for the in-specification product.
Up to you".This dilemma will be familiar to production facilities around the world. The
production staff have pulled out all the stops to meet their deadline - and very
proud of themselves too - and the quality controller rejects it. Often the
quality control function will have a separate reporting structure giving them
independence from production. The lines will converge somewhere, and often with
the CEO. And here is a scene repeated around the world, countless times every
day: the quality control representative and the production representative
arguing their respective cases in front of the boss. "I paid thousands in
overtime to get this product out!", says the production man. "The
product is not acceptable", says the Quality controller. "It's only
marginally out of specification", says production....and so on.Why is this scene played out so often? The boss is in an impossible situation
where he will let his customer down one way or another. Does he come open with
his customer and share his problem with them or does he let the product go
through and hope and pray? Or does he simply stop the product from going out and
say to the customer "do what you will, but I'm not letting a substandard
product leave this factory".It's easy to sit and read this and say: "don't let it go out". This
is great in theory, but if it means you will lose your customer altogether if
they don't receive their order on time then you are in a zero game. Just take my
earlier method of checking quality: when the competitor products are being lined
up for comparison, our boss' product won't even be in the line up if it never
made it to the customer! This is the dilemma in essence: what is worst, a
product with defects or no product at all? As I said, it is a zero game.It is of course nonsensical to let things go this far. Yet it happens
everywhere and happens all the time. There are conflicting theories as to
whether the quality control function should be separated from production or
whether it should be part of production. There is no easy answer. If the
quality controllers were in the production plant instead of outside it, would
they be on the "reject it" side or the "let it through"
side? Bear in mind that they are as culpable - if not more so - as the
production manager if the finished product is not up to standard. By mixing the
quality controllers in with the production staff there is a danger that things
will get personal. This in-built friction will be a battle of wills and the
winner will be the person or people with the most assertive personality. Not the
way to run a production line!So what is the answer? Here is a radical one for you: get rid of the quality
controllers. Make all the staff responsible for quality. Crucially, in
tandem with this, make sure the production manager is responsible for quality
and quantity in equal measure. His job should be to get the product out on time
and at the right quality. Make sure his bonus is based on both measures and not
weighted more one way than the other. The conflict between getting the product
out and getting it right would not be played out in the CEOs office when it is
too late, but in the production manager's head when planning production - even
urgent production. And get a good production manager - you can afford to pay for
the best now that you have no quality control staff.A company that is known world-wide for superior quality is Insectocutor.
The methods it employs obviously works as its fly killers are consistently of
the highest standards and workmanship. The management team of Insectocutor are
so confident of this that they guarantee their machines for 5 years. We sell a
range of their products at our web site at Arkay Hygiene. Insectocutor staff and
management need no lessons from me or anyone else on how to produce a product on
time and at the highest standard of quality. They have been doing it for over 40
years!High quality Insectocutor Fly Killers
from Arkay Hygiene. Take, for example, the excellent workmanship of the SE44
Stainless Steel Fly Killer Machine.
Category : Breast Cancer
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