Reference no: EM133190085

Now that you have a fuller understanding of quality, does your assessment of which vehicle is of higher quality change? How so?

And you've tried to answer the question, which of these vehicles has the highest quality? And that's a little bit of a trick question, all right? At one level, we'll see maybe that quality is in the eye of the beholder. But another level, I want to point out that quality is really a multi-dimensional construct.

The first dimension we can look at is performance. And that's performance relative to the customer's intended use. So it's not the performance being the Porsche 911 can go 186 miles an hour and get to 60 in 3 and 1/2 seconds versus the Toyota Camry, which can go-- I don't know-- 113 and it takes-- I don't know-- 11 seconds to get to 60. It's not necessarily that type of performance. It's a function of what's that vehicle going to be used for.

And if you're a grandmother and you're just shuttling yourself to the grocery store twice a week, that Camry is probably pretty close to what you need it to do. It's got high mileage. It's highly reliable. It fits your needs. But if you going to try and race it, yeah, probably not so much, right? So how well does it perform relative to how we're going to use that vehicle.

Features. In the land of quality, we generally consider more features to be higher quality. It allows us to have kind of special characteristics, allows us to tailor that product to our use or the way we would choose to use it.

Reliability. Reliability relates to the likelihood of breakdowns, the likelihood of malfunctions. And clearly, the more reliable the vehicle or the more reliable the product, the higher the quality, right? And this is where, again, Toyota has historically excelled, and BMW maybe not so much, right?

Serviceability is a little bit different. Serviceability refers to the speed and the cost and the convenience of service. Some products are just really serviceable, Some products not so much.

I think of when I started my life as an engineer. I was working in San Jose. I was driving my BMW. My roommate was driving his Alfa Romeo. And, yeah, it cost me-- I can't remember. I don't know-- $40 to get my oil changed or something like this, and his cost $250.

And at some point, he finally asked the service guy, why is the oil change so much more expensive? The service guy says, it's made to go Mr. [INAUDIBLE], not be fixed. And the reality is-- what happened with the Alfa Romeo is you ended up having to disassemble part of the front suspension in order to access the oil filter, right? Not really designed to be maintenance or serviced or repaired.

Durability, right, the amount of time and use before repairs are required. So the further we can go between repairs, the higher the quality. Aesthetics, effects on human senses, right? So how that item strikes us. How does it feel, right?

Here we have a Microsoft Surface. The aesthetics of the Surface relative to-- I don't know-- maybe an iPad, right? How does it look? How does it feel? How does it function? How is it that I interact with it? How comfortable is the pen to hold, right? These are all kind of aesthetic details. How is the phone design, right? How does it look? How does it feel?

And then conformance. How well does that product conform to design specifications? And all of these are important dimensions of quality, product quality in particular. But conformance, conformance is where we kind of live in the land of operations. Conformance is what we can control.

Performance, features, reliability, serviceability, durability, aesthetics, those are all baked in in engineering. We can't have really any meaningful contribution to those dimensions of quality. But we can impact conformance. And so the more tightly we can produce products to specification, the better the quality.

You think about that particular instance, right? Less and less and less variability in how we are able to attain performance or conformance to those specifications, the better that quality is going to be. So quality is a multi-dimensional construct. It is the conformance dimension that we focus on in operations management.