The Concept Of Quality

A bakery in Ibadan sells two thousand loaves a week. One Tuesday the mixer is loaded a minute short and forty loaves come out heavy and damp in the middle. Eleven of them are returned. The owner refunds eleven loaves, which costs her almost nothing, and thinks the problem is over. Six weeks later her Tuesday sales are down by two hundred loaves and she cannot work out why. The eleven refunds were never the cost of that batch. The cost was the customers who said nothing, did not come back, and told their neighbours.

This lesson is about that gap between what a quality failure appears to cost and what it actually costs. You will pin down what quality means in this course, which is not the same as expensive, and see how a business finds out whether it has a problem before its customers tell it. You will learn total quality management as a way of organising a whole workforce around getting things right the first time, weigh the real costs of maintaining quality against the real benefits, and finish with the situation the specification singles out: what happens to quality when a business grows and hands work to people it does not employ.