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Manjari Raman
``Quality is in the mind of the customer,'' said Brijmohan Lall, CMD, Hero Honda Motors Ltd. Little did he realise how apt these words were for the two companies showcased in the plenary sesssion on ``Customer-the Key To Business Excellence.'' Ironically, for diametrically different reasons.
When the customer drives quality at Hewlett Packard, it is an inspirational slogan. For HP - Worldwide has turned the focus of every process, employee and system sharply on the customer. At Godrej and Boyce Manufacturing Company Ltd' too, the customer seems to be driving quality--but with a punishing whip of losing market share. In this case, the company is still trying hard to catch up with dynamic customer needs against the onslaught of domestic and global competition.
In fact, if there was one message the session managed to reiterate, even though it did not ostensibly set out to do so, it was to throw in sharp contrast a professionally managed company's approach to quality--showcased by Dick Warmington,vice-president, Hewlett Packard Worldwide--and a family-led business' voiced by Jamshyd Godrej, managing director, Godrej & Boyce Manufacturing Company Ltd.
The former: committed to quality in a structured, long-term fashion; using quality as a delivery mechanism for corporate strategy; and graduating from customer loyalty to customer advocacy. The latter: guarded and piecemeal in the application of TQM; struggling with change and the need for quality; and struggling with customer needs rather than customer satisfaction.
In fact, HP's evolution in terms of quality lays a handy roadmap for companies growing in quality terms--HP actually calls its quality management system, the Quality Maturity System (QMS). In the formative years for example, the concepts that drove quality at HP were ``next-bench'' (design products for those using the product on the next bench in the lab) and ``test-fix-test'' (HP would never ship anything out without testing it first.)
Then, about two decades ago came the first stageof the formal QMS: Total Quality Control. At this stage, HP realised that it needed to outsource a large part of its manufacturing and that it would need to focus on controlling the quality of its vendors.
To track supplier quality emerged the TQRDCE checklist: technology, quality, responsiveness, delivery, cost, and environment. While the system helped HP develop a base of world-class vendors, pushing product development was another buzzword: FURP+, or functionality, usability, reliability, performance, supportability, and a host of pluses for the customer.
Then about ten years ago, HP rose one more notch on its quality journey: it matured to total quality management, where quality became an ingrained part of every process and person in the organisation. In 1980, John Young, founder chairman, imported a new quality concept from Japan: Hoshin Planning, where the top management led by the chief executive chooses one or two major breakthrough goals for the organisation to strive through, and which are quitedistinct from the short-term incremental improvements of TQM, or the business-as-usual goals set under management-by-objectives.One sample of a hairy, breakthrough goal John Young tossed his organisation, which incidently was already basking in the glow of being world-class? Improve reliability by ten times in ten years. At first HP balked at the ``impossible'' target, but by 1991, when failure rate per $1,000 had come down from approximately 1.0 in 1981 to .1, the power of Hoshin was clear. By now, HP had also learnt how to look at all processes in a fundamentally different fashion, in order to bring about breakthrough change rather than incremental improvement.
With Hoshin percolating to each aspect of HP's management--from accounts payable to human resource management--HP is now maturing to deal with its next management phase: customer-centred quality. The corporate goal now is to move from customer satisfaction (an attitude correlated with one or more purchases), to customer loyalty (a pattern ofbehaviour and intent characterised by repeat purchases and a willingnes to continue the relationship), to customer advocacy.
At the other end of the spectrum was Jamshyd Godrej's focus on business excellence through internal customer satisfaction. And of course, the diversified group's struggle to deal with paradigms such as mass customisation of products, satisfying customer needs versus satisfied customers, and defining new paramaters for measuring customer satisfaction in services versus manufactured products.
The fact that here was a family business which was struggling to come to terms with the new customer spawned by the competitive environment even as it tried to cling to its ``historic'' brand attributes became clear, when a member of the audience tried to point out that while he appreciated Godrej's approach of focussing on internal customers, didn't he think it was also important to bring supplier's into the ambit of change? ``No,'' snapped Godrej, ``I don't think so. It'll only complicatethings.'' Now what does that auger for the Godrej brandname on HP's Quality Maturity Index?
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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This story was printed from Net Express located at http://www.expressindia.com. Net Express provides a portal to India, with news from The Indian Express and The Financial Express along with sites on travel and tourism, the entertainment industry, the power sector, the environment and much more.
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