Quality is defined by its purpose

I use to work for a hydraulic company which there quality control systems and documentation were written to control its products and components through its suppler chain. There controls were very good but in some incidents were impossible to adhere to due to the business throughput.

This was compounded by the company employing a quality director who came from the aerospace industry who said upon his appointment “he was not going to change anything” as the Business growth saw record levels over the past 10 years. However he proceeded to do the exact opposite by imposing quality systems and checks on opponents in accordance to aerospace standards.

You may ask why this is a bad thing, surely product quality will improve? Will yes it will but only by adding additional service costs to processes, components & products which served the business well for the past 20 years.

Let me try and explain my point, we have in the world multiple car manufactures all producing different automobiles to very high standards. All the manufacturing are Quality focused in their processes and in the final product, however not all of them adopt the same quality processes. Let’s take Bentley / Rolls-Royce & compare the quality to that of a normal family car say a Ford.

Both are quality products & do more or less the same function by getting you from A to B. However if you impose the same quality systems from Rolls-Royce into Ford, well the cost of the family car would exceed the market cost.

This is why Quality is defined by its purpose, manufacturing processes and quality standards must not exceed the product functionality and its purpose, if you do then your competitors will take advantage and increase their market share.