T his week's article (and title) was
inspired by an old story I saw
in an American publication long
time ago. Last week, while cleaning up my
closet (as they say!), I encountered some
of my old notes I have taken during an
early work of Total Quality Management I
have done with one of my clients.(I would
not reveal the name to protect the innocent!)
Any road, the client said they would
buy into the concept, if they see success
stories of that same formula I was suggesting.
Even though that was an easy job,
I decided to take the opposite approach:
the "what if" approach.
What if we had less than perfect out put:
product or service? What if we get as close
as perfect, but not exactly that? And, what
if we give our customers less than 100%
of quality, accuracy and consistency?
Here are some examples of my "what if
questions" provided from the American
industry figures of production if it was
done at 99.9%:
* 22,000 checks will be deducted from
the wrong bank accounts every 60 minutes!
* 1,314 phone calls will be misplaced
by telecommunication services every
minute!
* 12 babies will be given to the wrong
parents each day!!
* 2,488,200 books will be shipped in the
next 12 months with the wrong cover!
* 5, 517, 200 cases of soft drink produced
in the next 12 months will be flatter
than a bad tire!
* 18, 322 pieces of mail will be mishandled
in the next hour!
* 880,000 credit cards in circulation
will turn out to have incorrect card holder
information on their magnetic stripe!
* 114, 500 mismatched pairs of shoes
will be shipped this year!
* $ 761, 900 will be spent in the next 12
months on tapes and CD's that won't play!
* 315 entries in Webster's third new
international dictionary of the English language
will turn out to be misspelled!
Incidentally, 99.9% accuracy would be
a remarkable improvement in the context
of observed performance level. For example:
* A Hewlett-Packard study of 300, 000
semiconductors from three American
firms and three Japanese firms found the
average failure rate of the American chips
was over 0.1 %, while the failure rate for
Japanese made chips was zero!
* The US airline industry, despite reams
of advertising about improved performance,
reported that just 80% of its flights
departed on time, and only 74% arrived on
schedule. The airline industry also
assumes 5-10% of all luggages will be
mishandled, and 3% of all checked baggage
will be lost on route!
Mind you, these are old figures, can you
imagine with the tremendous growth in
business what today's figures might look
like? But it we decide to take them as indicators,
and then we would know what a
big trouble we're in.
Bottom line note: business today can
not deliver less than 100% quality products
and services. You customers will not
tolerate any deviation. You are in the business
of undifferentiated products, so if you
can not match your high customers expectations,
somebody else will.
