This economic context emphasizing the importance of quality, as it is used as a
marketing competitive edge external to the manufacturing (or servicing) enterprise, is
symmetrically balanced by an equal stress on the economics of quality within the
enterprise. Quality is, as well as an information-gathering agency, a discipline of thrift, a
doctrine of frugality in the use of available resources.
Resources … what are the resources at the disposal of the manufacturer? There are four –
raw materials, machinery, time and people. The ‘trick’ of manufacturing management is to
make the best use of time and machinery, through the capabilities (or, as they are called these
days, ‘competencies’) of people, in order to transform 100 per cent of the bought-in raw
materials into saleable finished goods. Sounds simple enough. It is. But it is not easy. This
conversion ratio – the proportion of raw materials entering the plant which eventually
departs from the plant as finished goods (as opposed to scrap or returned products) – is a valid
measure of the effectiveness of management. This must be why a good many companies are
unable to quote it. The maximization of this conversion ratio is the job of quality.
You might at this point choose to step into that ancient and cloying swamp of semantics
by asking that hoary old conundrum, ‘Who is responsible for quality?’ and then going on to
suggest that the quality function cannot be ‘responsible’ for quality, since its practitioners
do no more than measure it. You might then go on to suggest, as so many others before you
have suggested, that since quality is not the responsibility of quality, it must therefore be
the responsibility of production. Your thinking, if you have pursued this route, is now well
and truly bogged down in the mire of meanings. You are now committed to a silly sectarian
squabble about who is responsible for quality, and it will go on and on and you will never
escape the swamp. Save your breath. It is the process which is responsible for quality. The job
of the people in the quality department is to measure the capability of the process, to
balance the see-saw on one end of which sit the customers’ needs, while on the other is
perched the measured capability of the process to meet those needs. The ‘responsibility’ for
quality belongs to the process and therefore to those in whose stewardship the entire
process of wealth-generation rests, whether they are called ‘production’ or ‘quality’ or
whatever. They are collectively the custodians of the resources whose purpose is the
generating of wealth by the adding of value, through the activity called ‘work’.
Work, from an economic standpoint, is identifiable as one of two kinds: