Fourth Wave of Quality : Shaping the Next Decade
Mr Vipin Sondhi, Managing Director & CEO
Mr G Sundararaman, Head Quality
JCB India Ltd.
From Product Quality to Quality of Life
The definition of Quality has been changing, like everything else.
India has been importing technologies, be it in automotive or the core engineering sector for decades and certainly in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Hence the mantra for Quality has been “Part to Print” – i.e. make parts as per the drawings provided. It is a basic definition that holds good even today. But the dimension of Quality since then has become bigger and bigger.
In this article, we have tried to categorise the Quality journey into four waves, that in our opinion have shaped the Quality journey in the decade in which each wave had the greatest impact.
Wave 1 of Quality in the 1980-1990 period was dominated by shop floor systems like Statistical Process Control etc., which we can categorize as the ‘Product Quality’ Wave.
Then, a significant change came about – “process dimension of making a part” becoming important in the 1990-2000 period. Total Quality Management became the buzzword. The ISO 9001 quality system swept industries. Tools of Process Mapping, Business Process Re-engineering were deployed. We can categorize this as the “Process Quality Wave” or Wave 2. However, this wave has also been dominated by the manufacturing shop-floor.
Wave 3 : What we are currently experiencing is the “Organization Quality” wave, post the year 2000. The entire organization is now being mobilized to serve the customer. The focus is on being ‘customer centric” – company wide. Buzzwords like Sigma and Lean are commonly prevalent. Black belts in many cases spearhead this movement. Focus on costs has come into being and conventional quality tools & techniques are being used for Total Cost Management programs.
This wave began bringing in service companies into its fold and manufacturing companies began including the entire organization in the Quality process.
We now need to move beyond this to “Quality of Life” – the Fourth Wave (or Wave 4) of Quality. In our opinion, it is imperative that industries look beyond the customer while defining Quality. Providing a value proposition to all stakeholders, including society will be crucial in the next decade. New practices in the Quality journey have to be invented and deployed for which there are three major drivers :
- Innovation : A much used word, it is not adequate to being theoretically brilliant, but the ability to translate Knowledge into Economic Growth and Social Well-being. Industries have to graduate from traditional Kaizen & Suggestion Schemes to developing innovative India-centric solutions.
- Resource Productivity : This is critical from the Global standpoint, but more so for an Indian viewpoint. We need to produce more using less. More for the masses, more for larger consumption, more for addressing Inclusiveness; But using Less, less of Material Inputs, less of Natural Resources, less of Energy consumption etc. We also need to graduate from merely piece rate calculations as a definition of Productivity to Resource Productivity.
- Sustainability : Solutions from industries are not only to be Inclusive but also Sustainable, so as to achieve a balance between Economic Growth and preservation of Natural Resources. Industries need to graduate from the traditional legislative compliance approach.
The Nano perhaps is the best example in this fourth wave of Quality, a wave in our view that will sweep the industrial and the services sector alike over the next decade…