Re: That Word Quality

[Myron Tribus <mtribus@home.com>]

If, as was suggested in Cliff Norman's post, you fail to distinguish 
between FEATURES and QUALITY, you lose the relationship "Higher 
quality leads to lower cost".
FEATURES are what you put into your product to attract a particular 
segment of the market.  QUALITY has to do with making good on the 
promise of what you deliver.

It is useful to apply these ideas to your INTERNAL customers as well 
as the external ones.  In that spirit, we judge the quality of an 
engineering design by how well it satisfies the needs of the 
manufacturing department for manufacturability.  Using the quality 
deployment matrix (house of quality) reveals many more and useful 
dimensions than can be generated in a generic list such as Garvin 
promoted.  The list is useful to guide discussion but the QFD matrix 
is a tool for results.

Myron Tribus,  350 Britto Terrace,  Fremont, CA 94539
Ph:510 651 3641  Fax: 510 656 9875   e-mail: mtribus@home.com
Mathematicians believe that the Normal Distribution of errors has 
been established experimentally; experimenters believe it is a law of 
mathematics. (Henri Poincare
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