Quality a great way to reduce costs!
Quality everyone knows they want it but everyone defines it differently. In business, you can't measure what you can't define and you can't control what you can't measure. So in order to improve it we must define it. According to Philip Crosby (author of Quality is Free) quality has to be defined as conformance to requirements, not as goodness, excellence, luxury or something that is based on opinion or experience.
If you delivered your product to the customer when the customer wanted it with the features your customer expected and in the color they requested, you have delivered a quality product. If you do this consistently, make a profit, and have happy employees you have a quality company. If you accomplished delivering a quality product by lots of rework and overtime, you have a quality product but not a quality company.
Improving the quality of both internal and external processes will reduce, instead of increase costs. Fixing a product, especially after it has been delivered to a customer, is always more costly than getting it right the first time. Mistakes eat up employee energy, time and increases stress.
A large book of policies and procedures that the employees are to follow will never improve the quality of a company's product if management takes short cuts or short-range solutions to problems. If the prevailing attitude in a company is that short cuts can be taken whenever 'necessary' costs will rise and morale will fall. I used to work in a company were a common question was 'Do you want it right or do you want it Friday'. This was also the company where a $60,000 discrepancy was considered a rounding error.
Implementation is probably the hardest part of improving quality. If top management is not convinced that quality will reduce costs and improve customer relations then it will never happen, no matter how committed the employees are. An attitude of 'that's good enough' will kill any effort.
As products get more complicated with little flexibility on pricing, costs must be kept to a minimum. The behind the scenes systems must be in place to keep things moving like clockwork. There is little room for solving the same kind of problem repeatedly. By analyzing each system and subsystem for quality, you build a solid foundation. This then gives confidence when deciding on new and bigger projects. Every complaint whether from a customer or from an employee points to an area that should be improved. Don't just handle the complaint; find a way to prevent it in the future. Everyday do something that makes a permanent improvement
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