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Courtesy: quality.org/article/what-quality
Why should organisations care about quality?
To survive and thrive. Good quality management can enhance your organisation’s brand and reputation, protect it against risks, increase its efficiency, boost its profits and position it to keep on growing. All while making staff and customers happier.
Quality is not just a box to be ticked or something you pay lip service to. Failures resulting from poor governance, ineffective assurance and resistance to change can, and do, have dire consequences for businesses, individuals and society as a whole.
Just ask BP. The company faces a total bill of £35bn from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill of 2010, which left 11 people dead, the region's environment devastated and an indelible stain on BP's reputation.
Or Volkswagen, which will be dealing with the fallout from the 2015 emissions cheating scandal for years to come (it's still too early to know how much it will cost them, but the amount will run to 10 figures at least).
Or the retailers Tesco, Iceland, Aldi and Lidl, whose reputations took a battering in 2013 when beef products were found to contain horsemeat.
None of these things need have happened if better quality management had been in place. But quality isn't just about disaster prevention – it's about achieving great results, and seizing opportunities to get better and better.
Quality isn’t just an issue for commercial enterprises. Every organisation has stakeholders of one kind or another whose needs they must strive to meet, which is what quality is ultimately about.