Over a career that spans 40 years, Steve Gruler has struggled with the fact that quality seems to be a soft term. “Companies often say, ‘We’ve got great quality. We’ve got the best quality,’ and they’re looking at customer complaints and certification systems as their primary metrics,” he attests.
Demonstrated by Dr. Joseph M. Juran’s Spiral of Progress, implementing quality is an evolutionary process. This point is so important that countless books and articles have been written on this subject.
It’s a rare company that doesn’t want to implement a better quality system, resulting in performance excellence for their company, employees, customers and stockholders. However, the pursuit of quality is easier said than done.
If you ever get a chance to watch an aircraft being built, take it. Walking through the aircraft hangar at Northrop Grumman’s Palmdale, CA, facility, you will see two unmanned aircraft, each with a 130-foot wingspan, parked behind yellow tape. The scale of the aircraft and the desert setting make it feel like a movie set.
If you subscribe to Quality, it seems safe to assume that quality is a priority for you. But even when it is a priority, achieving high levels of quality is an ongoing challenge that requires effort from every member of the organization every day.
Quality doesn’t just happen. It doesn’t come as a result of just the corner office, but of countless people in the organization. Achievement of a robust quality culture is an outcome of the combined efforts of the minds and hearts of everyone working together toward a common cause.
Certainly, quality professionals play an important role in their organization’s pursuit of improvement and customer satisfaction. However, managers must ‘walk the talk’ in pursuit of customer satisfaction.