Operations Management: Sustainability and Supply Chain Management, Twelfth Edition

Quality and Strategy

As Arnold Palmer Hospital and many other organizations have found, quality is a wonderful tonic for improving operations. Managing quality helps build successful strategies of differentiation, low cost, and response. For instance, defining customer quality expectations has helped Bose Corp. successfully differentiate its stereo speakers as among the best in the world. Nucor has learned to produce quality steel at low cost by developing efficient processes that produce consistent quality. And Dell Computers rapidly responds to customer orders because quality systems, with little rework, have allowed it to achieve rapid throughput in its plants. Indeed, quality may be the key success factor for these firms, just as it is at ...