Press Releases

QUALITY RACE IS HOTTING UP AS NEVER BEFORE

There is an explosion of new competitors every day. Businesses are becoming more challenging. Markets are getting saturated. Distributors are flexing their muscles. Margins are sinking and products and services are becoming obsolete. Customers are becoming fiercely demanding. They want best of the world products. How can we achieve business transformations in this scenario?

Business transformation in today’s economy calls for junking conventional wisdom, destroying old advantages, disrupting equilibrium, violating established norms, reengineering business practices, shutting down businesses, behaving counter intuitively, passionate pursuit of inconsistency and expressed lunacy. You need brave hearts to do all that.

To achieve these transformations requires a new definition for quality. Unfortunately our understanding of quality is still drawn from our manufacturing experiences, whereas 90% of business in the near world will be based on services. The role of quality in manufacturing industries such as generators, washing machines and refrigerators is to reduce the variability through SQC and Six Sigma. Service industries like hotels, theme parks need a different approach to quality. The Disney magic is not just about defect free rides. These are taken for granted. It is about managing emotions, expectations and experiences. Wide variations in expectations are likely because consumer may have different tolerance level about things that can go wrong. For example, when there are long waiting queues for a favorite ride, the issue isn’t just length of the wait but also how a particular customer feels about waiting. Disney realized it could make a wait funfilled by sending out live Disney characters for the crowd to see and play with. What could have been a problem was turned into a new opportunity to reinforce the Disney magic.

In the new world, therefore, quality is not conformance to requirement. It is not meeting agreed terms and changes. It is using technology, ingenuity and innovation to provide awesome products and services that enliven our senses, instill well being and fulfill even the unexpressed wishes and unarticulated aspirations. Quality is in anticipating the future needs and coming up with products and services to meet them before the competition does.

These are the issue being addressed at the 13th World Congress on Total Quality being held from 14th – 16th February, 2003 at ITC Grand Maratha Sheraton, Mumbai. The theme of the Congress is “Delivering Business Transformation through Quality Approaches”. The event is a Mecca of Quality professionals with experts coming from all over the world. There are in all 92 speakers already registered. Golden Peacock Awards for Quality & Innovation will also be presented at the inaugural session. A new Golden Peacock Award has been instituted to encourage corporatisation of the entertainment industry. There are two awards, one for the film & the other for the TV section. Rajshri Productions have been declared winners in the Hindi Cinema category of films & Balaji Telefilms in the TV section.

Saswati Basu Chatterjee
Director Public Relation