Planning therefore requires setting objectives and identifying methods to achieve those objectives. A firm may have the objective of increasing its short and long term profitability by improving the overall quality of its products.
By improving product quality, the firm should be able to reduce scrap and rework, decrease the number of customer complaints and the amount of warranty work, reduce the resources currently assigned to inspection, and so on, thus increasing profitability. This is accomplished by working with suppliers to improve the quality of incoming raw materials, establishing quality control circles, and studying defects to ascertain their cause.