Competing on the Eight Dimensions of Quality

U.S. 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. industry can be depended on to deliver reliable products. 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. Why?