The role of Quality
With increasingly intense competition, quality plays a key role in differentiating manufacturers and their products in the market. While metrics like productivity and efficiency play a key role within a manufacturing organisation, what the customer values most is quality.

But many times quality is sacrificed to cut costs or to ensure productivity. In this light, what is Friedrich doing to build quality management within the manufacturing system? "Talking about quality is always difficult until we understand exactly what quality is.

Philip Crosby defines quality as ‘conformance to requirements'. Practically, we have to understand the customer's expectations. Once these expectations can be quantified, we know what they are willing to pay for and they certainly aren't willing to pay for unrequested features.

This will unquestionably influence design and production costs in many ways. I don't see any contradiction between quality and cost competitiveness. If we do things right the first time every time, we can avoid additional costs for the company," Friedrich explains.

"Considering that, I am now getting to a very significant aspect. What we have to avoid is delivering products which do not comply with the requirement or are even faulty. In this case, we talk about non Quality or failure. Customers won't pay for that and it will lead to additional cost of replacement, warranty, compensation and additional internal resources for handling the complaints," he adds.

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