Managers know that they have to improve the quality of their products because, alas, U.S. Consumers have told them so.

A survey in 1981 reported that nearly 50% of U.S. Consumers believed that the quality of U.S. Products had dropped during the previous five years; more recent surveys have found that a quarter of consumers are “not at all” confident that U.S. Wpc Files Pazzles Creative Cutter on this page.

Industry can be depended on to deliver reliable products. Bryony S Only. Many companies have tried to upgrade their quality, adopting programs that have been staples of the quality movement for a generation: cost of quality calculations, interfunctional teams, reliability engineering, or statistical quality control. Few companies, however, have learned to compete on quality. Part of the problem, of course, is that until Japanese and European competition intensified, not many companies seriously tried to make quality programs work even as they implemented them. But even if companies had implemented the traditional principles of quality control more rigorously, it is doubtful that U.S.

Consumers would be satisfied today. In my view, most of those principles were narrow in scope; they were designed as purely defensive measures to preempt failures or eliminate “defects.” What managers need now is an aggressive strategy to gain and hold markets, with high quality as a competitive linchpin. Self Gizmodgery Download there.