This view is critical in understanding the link between the user-baseda pproach to quality and the operational (manufacturing-based) view of quality. Discovering where an organisation does not meet customers' needsa nd expectations and then devising strategies to deal with it are important activities for managing quality.
(ii) Quality of conformance: Quality of conformance means producing a product to meet the specification. When a product conforms to the specification it is deemed by operations to be a "quality" product even though the quality of design may be "low" (Schroeder 1989). Therefore, the main task of conformance quality is the control of quality. Quality control is defined as the task of preventing poor quality products from leaving the plant (Harris and Gonzalez 1981). Schroeder (1989) takes a more long term and proactive view and stated "quality control is aimed at continuous improvement of a stable process" primarily through statistical process control which tries to separatea ssignable causes from random ones and continuously removes causeso f error through inspection to detect errors and find the causes of those errors. 2-2-2.1 Approaches to Quality Management The approaches to the task of quality management have been changed over the last few years from a "traditional" reactive approach, through a more prevention orientated or proactive approach to the more recent strategic, or total quality managementa pproach. Table (2-3 ) summarises the main features of each approach.