Operations Management For Dummies

Chapter 12

Managing Quality

In This Chapter

Understanding how the customer views quality

Exploring the costs and payoffs of quality

Managing quality efforts

Building quality into the product design process

Using various tools to measure quality

Quality is an aspect of a product that leaps to the forefront of a customer’s attention when something doesn’t perform as expected. Yet producing a quality product or providing a quality service must center on well-considered operations; it doesn’t happen by accident. As an operations manager, you must ensure that quality drives every process and decision. This is sometimes a thankless effort because you’ll likely only hear about quality issues from dissatisfied customers.

In this chapter, we take an in-depth look at quality — how to define it, how to measure it, and how to determine the costs associated with it.

Deciding What Matters

When assessing quality, the first question you need to ask is, “What is a quality product?” Only your customer ...