Even though quality cannot be defined, you know what quality is. Many people say that clothes bought at a market are not necessarily worse in quality than the more expensive brands they buy in high street shops. Clothes, as well as many other products, are notoriously variable, and the quality in many cases does not reflect the price. Customers definitely recognize that quality is an important attribute in products and services. But it seems that the so-called quality is constantly declining due to the outsourcing of manufacture to the Far Eastern countries and the internationalization of trade and competition, while the price gap remains. The line is, people want quality but they do not want to pay too high a price.
And how do companies ensure quality in times of mass production? Since the 1980s, various methods have been developed to improve the quality of products or services worldwide, after it was discovered that the secret of the competitive success of the then world-dominating Japanese manufacturers was their focus on quality. The Japanese had a quality system that allowed them to produce better products than their US and European rivals. After World War II, Japan decided to make quality improvement a national priority as part of rebuilding their economy and asked some American experts for help. By implementing American ideas in their management policies and manufacturing processes, Japanese companies soon came to dominate the world market.
They have contributed a number of successful quality methods later adopted by Western companies, the best known among them being TQM (Total Quality Management), which requires that a company maintains its quality standards in all aspects of its business, not just in production. Although TQM, as well as some other Japanese methods, went out of fashion in the late 1990s, the ideas behind them are still very valuable.
