How companies get to do repeat business?

I work for an IT services company that makes over 90% of its revenue from repeat business.   For the last few days or so, I was thinking about the reasons how certain companies get to maintain long-lasting customer relationship and generate repeat business.  I wanted to delve a little deeper into this topic.

To start with, let us analyze this from a customer point of view.  Why do we regularly shop at one particular retail store over others?  The potential answers I could think of were:
1. Good quality products
2. High availability
3. Low prices
4. Good customer service
5. Ease of shopping
6. Location proximity

We can see that there are a number of factors that can contribute in enabling repeat business. Now, the important question is how companies are able to consistently do this.  It is difficult to do well in all of the above points.  Is it not?

After a little deeper thought, I could classify the above points into 3 focus buckets - i) Product differentiation, ii) Operational Excellence, and iii) Customer Experience.   So, successful companies, that do repeat business, will need to have hardcore focus on at least one of these 3 points and do their possible best on the remaining two.  Let us look at examples of few companies and confirm whether this analysis is true or not.

The first company that came to my mind is Apple which is known for its product differentiation. Apple products are also relatively expensive when compared to similar products from other companies.  Though, many customers are willing to pay a premium for the experience these products deliver.

The next company is Walmart.  I think Walmart's core strength is operational excellence.  They are able to ensure high availability of various products at lower prices with close location proximity to customers.  Customers of Walmart may not be too cost conscious as most of them have good confidence on the low price commitment from Walmart.

One company that delivers great customer experience is Amazon.  They are known for making shopping experience easy and pleasant.  Customer care and service is of primary importance.  I have seen the maximum number of shopping innovations around product pricing, shipping options, buying modes, shopping cart and loyalty at Amazon.

The 3 focus points - product differentiation, operational excellence and customer experience applies to services companies as well.  We can see that there are many other companies that are successful in delivering repeat business by leveraging these 3 focus points appropriately.      

I invite you to share your thoughts and comments on the above analysis.

Knowledge Management: To kill re-invention, improve quality and promote innovation

How does Knowledge Management complement Quality - is the core question of discussion for the ASQ bloggers, this month. Arun Hariharan, founder of The CPi Coach is the guest author of this thought provoking blog post focused on knowledge management.

In the blog post, Arun makes an interesting comment on Knowledge Management (KM) that it only kills re-invention and not innovation.  He says, KM must be available in an organized fashion to facilitate further knowledge creation within the organization and re-use of existing knowledge promotes innovation.  Modern companies carry out several KM initiatives for generating innovative ideas from employees.    These KM programs help institutionalize best practices and standardize business processes.   Excellence models such as Baldrige and EFQM highly value KM.  The synergy between KM and Quality is also clearly brought out as part of the blog post.

KM transformation will help in the improvement of quality of processes with in the organization and the products and services it offers to customers.  Modern organizations have started to reimagine their workplaces to institutionalize 'social' knowledge management as customers expect high quality across all aspects of products and services.

I have attempted below to discuss some recent trends that is helping organizations to transform knowledge management.

Many of the top organizations have created an enterprise social platform to enable collaboration, foster innovation and ideation and, subsequently, integrating them to business goals and objectives. True collaboration can be achieved only by breaking hierarchies and silos within the organization. Thus, creation of a flat organization structure leveraging social is a best solution option.  This type of social system actively promotes collaboration to create, dissipate and enable consumption of knowledge amongst various stakeholders.

To motivate employees and ensure regular participation, the collaboration platform is integrated with a gamification set up.  The real value of collaboration is achieved only when employees are intrinsically motivated and they compete to collaborate.   A carefully crafted gamification system comprising of badges, points and leaderboards is implemented.

Continuing the social journey, organizations have attempted to reduce top-down communication and rather promote multi-directional conversations.  When 2 parties within the organization are interacting, many others are directly listening and indirectly consuming the knowledge dissipated from these conversations.  This is the true power of an enterprise social platform that enables creation of an open culture for KM and is important for the next generation employees comprising of Gen Y, millennial and baby boomers.  

Crowdsourcing, an approach to resolve complex problems, is another interesting flavor of KM adopted by  modern organizations.  By leveraging a million minds - internal and external to the enterprise, organizations extract the best knowledge in an efficient manner.  The extracted knowledge is highly valuable and produces high quality solutions for the large and complex problems.

We can observe that KM is in the correct transformation path to address the needs of tomorrow's modern organizations and, in turn, enable them to deliver high quality products and services.

The Power of Social Media

The latest IT wave of digital is comprised of Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud known as SMAC, in short.  Some of us may wonder about the role of social in digital and it may appear to be an odd man out of S-M-A-C.

The reality is that social cuts across the digital forces - Mobile, Analytics and Cloud.    Let me explain.  We all know that mobile is the user facing entity and the access point.  When multiple users communicate via mobile, it becomes a social platform.  This platform generates a lot of data to help organizations derive analytics for their business intelligence.  The amount of data generated is so huge that it has to be stored on to a cloud data store.  So, social plays an important role as the integration element of SMAC.

Dr. Manu Vora has carefully chosen to write a blog post on "The Gift of Knowledge Transfer through Technology", a relevant topic for today's context.   Dr. Manu's post primarily talks about social collaboration via technologies such as Google Hangout and its direct and indirect benefits.  Based on Dr. Manu's experience, Google Hangout has various benefits. It is free and available to all, can connect a large number of participants, automatically record videos and post them to YouTube, conversations are available for offline reading etc. He has real experience of using social, in his projects, to improve knowledge, communication skills and creativity.   

But I believe that social has more power and I have attempted to list those additional characteristics - The 4Cs: 

a. Conversation - Traditional focus was always on communication - top-down or bottom-up and one-on-one or one-to-many.  With the advent of social, communication has become conversation - multi-directional and many-to-many.  Today when two people converse, many others get to listen, comment and contribute.   Take for example, a post in Facebook.  Many people that belong a network of the original poster can follow and contribute to the post.  Many times, conversations in Facebook get deeper on the topic of the post and also on the reach.  The power of social conversations is immense.

b. Collaboration - With social, task-based workplaces are replaced by collaborative workplaces. Teams collaborate to achieve a particular goal or an objective. The right team members voluntarily join hands with the focus of completion of goals and objectives.  For example, houzz.com is a collaborative way of designing the home.  In the earlier era, tasks were created and assigned to teams to get the work done.  

c. Crowdsourcing -  NASA has recently initiated a crowdsourcing effort to seek inputs on establishing sustained human presence on the planet Mars.  Let us imagine that there was no social concept, then how do you think NASA could carry out such an exercise.  Through crowdsourcing, organizations are able to perform huge tasks quickly and in a cost-effective manner with a strong innovation focus.  In olden days, huge tasks were always a challenge and many times impossible to do or complete.

d. Co-Innovation - The overarching characteristic of social is co-innovation.  Social provides a fantastic platform for everybody to join hands and innovate together.  The social platform can intrinsically motivate people to stay focused, develop novel ideas and also implement them in an efficient manner. Social platform helps in continuous improvement, a key attribute required to ensure quality.

Conversations, Collaboration and Crowdsourcing thus help organizations to Co-innovate leveraging the power of social.      

The Art of Possible

"How Lean Helped Me Travel To Egypt with Just $500" was an interesting blog post from Sunil Kaushik.   I really admired his way of applying quality tools in real-life scenarios such as for his own vacation.

Sharing economy is evolving rapidly in today's world and is also fairly successful.   Innovative businesses such as Uber, AirBnB etc., are revolutionizing the business world with their disruptive ideas that is working well in action.  Newer and unimagined opportunities exist for such innovative companies.

Due to the evolution of high speed network connectivity (mainly internet) and modern high performance consumer devices,  say for example an Apple iPhone, digital have emerged as a fundamental force that can disrupt the business world.  Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) are the foundational digital forces that enable innovations and newer business practices for both businesses and individuals.  Ability to effectively utilize digital in the business world can work wonders.

Sunil could creatively blend the sharing economy with digital and apply quality tools to create and execute a lean travel plan to Egypt for just $500.  His experience is something that looks like a 'not-so-feasible' plan.  The beauty is that he could successfully execute it.  Through this blog, Sunil has demonstrated the Art of Possible.   This was mainly possible by leveraging digital, sharing economy and, importantly, the various quality tools.

The bigger challenge for quality professionals now will be to fine tune existing quality tools or discover newer ones for the digital world of tomorrow.  What do you say?

The Future: Ensure Digital Quality

 'Quality Throughout' is the 2015 Future of Quality Report.  I invite you to download a copy of the same and read it.  Laurel Nelson-Rowe, ASQ Managing Director has written the guest post for this month, where she asks the influential voices bloggers to share their views about this report and "the future of quality" from now on.  

Switch on the time machine to  step back to the year 2007.  One of the key happenings then was the introduction of iPhone, by Apple, that really triggered the birth of business disruption using Digital, especially mobile smartphones.  Companies that embraced Digital technologies survived while many others, that did not, perished. Following the iPhone invention, digital innovations around Cloud computing, Social Media, Big Data and Hadoop, Machine Learning etc., started to appear and eventually gained prominence.  Companies started using Digital as a differentiator  to run and stay ahead in business. 

Today, mobile channel is one of the prominent business channels for many enterprises.  It is responsible for about of 50% total business transactions in many organizations, especially in retail sector.  Smaller companies, that did not have the capability to make heavy investments, could compete with larger corporations by adopting cloud services such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service(IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service.  By leveraging commodity infrastructure and high bandwidth network, enterprises obtained the power to derive business intelligence from huge amounts of (big) data such as real-time web click streams, server logs etc., which earlier were ignored.   So, over the last few years, the world for many organizations have changed significantly, due to digital, and that journey is still on.

Quality professionals have a lot of work ahead to devise concepts, processes and tools,  that will ensure high quality, consistent customer experience and care across various channels such as mobile, web, in-store and over-phone.  They also have the responsibility to assure high quality of big data, a major pain point today when dealing with unstructured or semi-structured data.  Security is a key concern for many organizations that want to adopt cloud.  How to ensure high compliance to security guidelines and how to measure and control the same is an issue a quality professional can help address.  In summary, there is a lot of work ahead for a quality professional in the future digital world.

The buzzwords of today and, apparently tomorrow, are "Digital" and "Internet-of-Things (IoT)".  Future of quality will be to assure that everything is alright around Digital. Thus, quality professionals will need to help build the right quality processes, tools, concepts etc., relevant to this new and emerging digital world.

The Real Value of Conferences

This month's blog post is by Julia of ASQ Communications and she has come with an apt topic for discussion this month - The Pros and Cons of Conferences.   It is apt because the prestigious 2015 World Conference on Quality and Improvement is going to happen at Nashville, TN from May 4 to May 6, 2015.  In her blog post, Julia asks an important question about the 'value of conferences, meetings and in-person events'.  In her question, the term 'in-person' is key.

In fact, Julia's question is valid and relevant to today's context.  Many organizations and individuals may not prefer to participate in such in-person events or conferences due to the reasons such as - i) it is an expensive affair, due to the travel and registration costs, ii) there are cost-effective ways to participate remotely, for example - through web conferencing, or,  iii) watch video channels or read blogs, for example - YouTube,  as they provide live or delayed telecast of conference proceedings.

To attract more participation in conferences, organizations strive to deliver 'value'.  When individuals perceive a greater value, they tend to participate in-person.  I would like to look at this 'value', from an attendee point of view, and discuss 5 special points that makes conferences unique and effective.

1.  Time and Effort, dedicated - True and effective learning happens when there is dedication. Conferences are those events primarily focused on learning and knowledge sharing.   Since people typically invest their 2 to 4 dedicated days at conferences, they get to learn and share knowledge, or discuss business - to their satisfaction.  This dedication is very unique to conferences and a  real value element that generates satisfaction

2.  The Guest Speakers, those famous personalities - It is always great to see or meet with famous personalities in-person and listen to them.  This is often possible only during conferences.  Conferences with best and famous speakers receive better registration and participation

3.  The Sessions, you get to really learn - Breakout sessions are very important from a learning perspective.  You can ask questions to the presenter only if you participate and interact live.  You also get to listen to others questions which is most often not effective, or even possible, when participating through web conferencing or while watching video channels

4.  Networking, meet human beings - Physical networking and the ability to exchange business cards is only possible in in-person events.  The bonding that one can create while meeting people and spending few days will be long lasting than virtual networking

5.  Entertainment and Fun, those memorable moments - Most conferences are designed with some entertainment and fun aspects.   It is not always serious business.  After a long set of presentations, discussions and breakout sessions, some entertainment and fun really makes the event more memorable for participants.

The forthcoming ASQ World Conference has all the 5 'value' elements discussed above.  Looking forward to meet you there.

Some more Ideas to promote STEM education in next generation

This month, Bill writes about the importance of promoting Science-Technology-Engineering-Mathematics (STEM) education and discusses on aspects of how to create and encourage the next generation of STEM professionals.  In 2014, through an ASQ survey, members were asked to provide advice to engineering students on how to develop the STEM skills.

The advice from ASQ members were on topics such as - i) improve analytical thinking and develop ability for big picture thinking, ii) improve communication skills, iii) find qualified mentors, iv) take business courses, v) have well-rounded interests including arts, and, vi) form team projects and strong organizations.

The survey from ASQ was a fantastic effort and another great social initiative from ASQ.  While the member survey resulted in various useful advice to students and the budding engineering community, I would like add and complement some more thoughts, as listed below:

1. Firm up fundamentals - Many a times, the student missed to learn the basics of science and technology courses and, in turn, they find it difficult to take up advanced courses.  The school curriculums should be adjusted to firm up to teach students on fundamental topics which will help lay a strong foundation in students and can generate or promote interest to learn science, technology and mathematics.  Educational organizations can provide more opportunities for those students to catch up on learning STEM fundamentals

2. Foster ideation, innovation by setting up local clubs and chapters - Young generation always have tons of innovative ideas.   Many have and think about their ideas and, unfortunately, do not proceed further to build or test the ideas.  It is important for schools and other business organizations to build local clubs or chapters (similar to Toastmasters club) to foster ideation and innovation etc

3. Promote education through social media - The new generation really embraces social media and daily find time to spent there.  Social media can transform as a channel to foster new generation education.   Business organizations and schools must leverage social media to promote networking, knowledge sharing, learning amongst students

4. Intrinsically motivate to learn through gamification - Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are getting popular now a days.  Top schools around the world now offer free online education to millions of students.  With proper use of gamification and MOOCs, students can be intrinsically motivated to learn STEM topics

5. Provide more infrastructure for hands-on experiments - While there will be plenty of avenues to learn theoretical topics, it is important to have the best infrastructure available to try-out what the students have learned.  Universities, schools, business organizations must join hands to set up "open-labs" for students to come and try hands-on experiments and practical exercises.  Simulations will play a big role, with emergence of mobile, big data and cloud, online infrastructure also needs to be set up for such needs.

STEM is extremely important and the foundation of growth for world economies.  It is therefore important for the world community to participate and contribute towards various initiatives to develop strong STEM professionals.

  

Who influenced and Inspired me on Quality?

Bill's blog post of this month is on the topic "Finding Inspiration From Quality Leaders".    It was a great learning experience for me reading about these two leaders, Secretary O'Neill and Governor Cuomo,  who preached and practiced quality - truly inspiring personalities.

Bill highlights 3 key points that Secretary O'Neill implemented during his tenure as a CEO at Alcoa - i) Making safety on the job as his and organization's top priority, ii) to treat everybody with dignity and respect, and, iii) be the best in the world at everything you do.  I now understand the secret of success of great leaders - they simply practice and preach strong quality fundamentals.  Per Bill, Governor Cuomo transformed the New York State Local Motor Vehicle Department to reduce customer wait times and increase efficiency.  Governor Cuomo made it very clear that quality is the recognized and inspired standard for New York State Government operations.

Bill, in his blog post, asks the ASQ Influential Voices Bloggers to write about those quality leaders and their key teachings and contributions.

My teacher and Professor Dr. SM Kannan exposed me to the field of quality.   He is an expert in the field of quality in topics such as - selective assembly, design of experiments, Taguchi techniques, Total Quality Management etc.  I would like to list down some of his key teachings that transformed me from a student to a quality professional:

a) Always aim for long-term results  - I was taught to not get worried about short-term losses and my teacher always mentored me to focus only on long-term results.  Here, he indirectly taught me to focus on "quality assurance" over "quality control" as a success measure.

b) Ensure total quality - When it comes to any task, activity or project, one has to ensure quality at all levels - customer, process, product and culture.  He insisted to always practice Total Quality Management over fragmented approaches.

c) There is no substitute for excellence - Another key teaching was to always demonstrate excellence and there are no substitutes.  Continuous improvement is the key and regular measurement of incremental growth is very important.  He taught me to learn every day and up-skill regularly. Once he said, if you are unable to add a new entry to your Curriculum Vitae (CV), at least once every six months, that means your career is stalling.  The importance of quantitative measurement of results was a key learning for me.

d) Hard work is always rewarded - Last but not the least, he always practiced perseverance and hard work and made me firmly believe that I will be more lucky and successful only when I work hard.

My professor laid a good and solid foundation of quality for me and I believe that his teachings are really valuable to all.

Next Generation Open Quality Communities

This was one of those blog posts by Bill that made me think quite a bit, before I could pen my thoughts.  The blog post revolves around the article by Brooks Carder, a long time member of ASQ. Brooks, in his article, makes a strong point about quality - "After all, quality is responsible for many of the things that makes life better".   Quoting some of Brooks thoughts, Bill has asked 2 questions to the fellow ASQ bloggers - how to encourage those who work on quality to understand their own value, and, how to spread the message of quality in a marketplace that is primarily focused on other objectives.

I agree with Brooks and believe that quality is responsible to make our lives better - directly or indirectly, visibly or invisibly.  Conversely, poor quality products and services give immense trouble to the society; examples are in plenty - from automobile recalls to airplane accidents - attributed to poor quality.

It is important to encourage those who work on quality - both individuals and enterprises.   Governments, ASQ, and Other Professional Bodies have put in various mechanisms in place for this.  For example, ASQ members with high experience and proven contributions towards quality are awarded with Senior and Fellow member statuses.  ASQ also recognizes Quality Practitioners and Gurus for their contributions towards quality through its prestigious Awards and Scholarships.   Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Awards (MBNQA) is awarded to US companies that excel in Quality.   In lines with MBNQA, there are other awards to enterprises and organizations that consistently demonstrate high quality and performance excellence; examples are Tata Business Excellence Model (TBEM) award in India for Tata group companies and National Quality Award by American Healthcare Association (AHCA) - for performance excellence.  A complete list of National Quality Awards can be found here.

We can now see that there are lots of mechanisms to recognize, motivate and inspire individuals and enterprises, in the form of awards, scholarships, rewards etc., to contribute towards quality.  The big question to ask is - are these mechanisms sufficient enough to encourage those who work on quality to understand their own value.  May be not!

While quality awards primarily focus on extrinsic motivation, the quality professionals and practitioners must ideally also be motivated intrinsically.   Like the open source software communities,  global quality professional communities will need to be formed that work on creating and improving innovative and practical quality concepts, tools, techniques and processes for the betterment of society.   Professional bodies like ASQ can facilitate the formation of such communities by creating platforms for collaboration, research and development, and implementation.   These communities will need to completely forget the commercial aspects, whatsoever, and primarily focus on contributions towards innovation in quality and improvement of human society.

Today's is a highly collaborative world.  Due to the advancements in smart devices, internet and network technologies, quality professionals, across the world, can stay closely connected and collaborate in real-time.   While various quality communities and groups exist today, they need to be tweaked, restructured or re-engineered for the modern world scenarios and needs.  The newer quality communities will motivate creation of newer quality concepts and tools and also bring to light newer quality gurus to the world.   ASQ Influential Blogger community is a welcome initiative from ASQ for such a collaborative platform that connects quality professionals across the world.  Further newer platforms are yet to emerge and evolve!

  

Networking - An important benefit of professional membership

Networking is an important buzzword of modern day.  It has become much more popular due to the advent of social media.   Today, network connections, be it long-term or short-term, can be built with greater speeds.  One need not know somebody personally to get connected.  Connections happen at multiple levels (direct and indirect) and through different channels.

Professional organizations like ASQ have played a key role to connect quality professionals, around the world, and other stakeholders together to network at individual and group levels.   I always believed that networking is one of the most important benefits of membership with professional organizations.  Bill, through A View from the Q, has asked an important question - how do you encourage people to join a professional organization?  My immediate response is Networking.

I have personally experienced the following benefits, due to networking, through my continued association with ASQ (India and US) for the last 12 years or so:

• Get to know others (quality professionals) - Get introduced and build good professional relationships
• Learn  - Get to know newer things, ideas and identify areas of improvement. Prepare and clear Certifications 
• Share knowledge with others - Forums to discuss, debate and teach 
• Improve communication skills - Both oral and written skills
• Gather thoughts, new ideas and alternate view points - Bring in newer perspectives to quality related discussion items, issues. Opportunities to innovate 
• Do tasks together, bring-in synergy - Work in pairs/groups, resolve larger/complex issues
• Work together for a social cause - Support the society and be socially responsible
• Continuous Self-improvement - Learn and improve every day.

You might have observed, and sometimes experienced, that the face of networking is changing. I believe that it will dramatically change further, during the forthcoming days, and professional organizations have to be prepared for that.

Traditional networking was only through face-to-face meetings, emails and phone calls. Current day networking, especially for Gen Y,  is predominantly through social media - Google Hangout+, FaceBook, Twitter, Whatsapp, video channels like YouTube and Blogs.   In future, more real-time collaboration will be demanded for effective networking. Along with social media, high quality video and audio based newer services will play a significant role in enabling  networking with virtual connections happening through wearables and other mobile devices.

So, professional organizations need to be prepared to attract newer members while retaining existing ones.  They have to continuously evolve and improve.

Please note that ASQ is already way ahead on these aspects - Check these out:

• ASQ @ Hangout
• ASQ TV
• ASQ @ YouTube
• ASQ @ FaceBook
• ASQ @ Twitter

  

Balanced Scorecard approach to Strategy

This time Bill chose to write about Strategy.  With his military background, his perspectives about strategy planning and execution, that he shared here, is very unique and insightful.  I have listed below some of the key take away points, from his post, where he cleverly blends strategy with quality:

• Split the strategy planning time by involving the team - supervisor and the level of command - collaboration is important
• Start the strategy planning process by writing down the facts and assumptions - factor hidden assumptions
• Validate whether the components of strategy will get you where you wanted to go - understand the vital aspects clearly and early
• Perform the feasibility test of the strategy and, only on success, proceed further - better to be practical  
• Question those activities performed outside the strategy framework - stay 100% focused
• Review, obtain feedback and improvise the strategy before proceeding with deployment - continuously improve and incorporate actions

I think that Bill's approach towards strategy is solid, very practical and many of these points come from his varied experience and background.

I have used another approach for strategy planning and execution which works fairly well, especially in the Information Technology industry, - the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) approach.   A typical BSC comprises of a list of organization goals, for a financial year,  along with defined targets.   The BSC is capable of measuring and providing feedback to organizations in order to meet the set goals.

The four strategy areas that the BSC focus are : i) Customer, ii) Finance, iii) Internal functions and iv) Learning & Growth.   For a financial year, the process starts with the setting of goals and associated targets at the organizational level.  The BSC is appropriately cascaded down to the bottom levels of the organization structure.  Subordinate's goals are aligned to supervisor's goals.  The measurement of goals against targets are captured and reviewed, on a quarterly basis.  Gaps, if any, are documented and used as a feedback to come up with suitable action items to catch-up or fix these gaps.

BSC also serves as an effective data collection tool that quantifies performance results.   Since the BSC aligns to one's performance goals, it gets the right importance at all levels and is found to be effective.  

BSC can become a much powerful tool for strategy planning and execution if we incorporate the key insights shared by Bill, into it, at the early stages of planning.  As Bill rightly suggested, it is important to collaborate during the goal setting and target definition process to make it much more effective.   Assumptions, especially any hidden ones, must be understood to the best possible extent. Review the BSC and come up with associated actions and tweak to improve the BSC appropriately, during the initial 1 or 2 months.  Encourage employees to stay focussed and avoid deviating from the set BSC strategy.    

The Future of Quality - A Revolutionary Change

The” future of quality” is the hot seat topic for discussion this month.   Bill’s question is whether, in future, quality will undergo an evolutionary change or a revolutionary change!  Per Bill, evolutionary change means moving down traditional paths of quality but reach newer destinations in recognizable and well-defined ways.  On the other hand, revolutionary change means the changes to fundamentals, newer value cycles and sharing of knowledge freely in newer media.

Over the past several years, quality has undergone smaller, but incremental changes - the evolutionary way.  I think it will undergo revolutionary changes, from now onwards - at least for another decade or so.  Here are my associated thoughts:

Today’s business environment is highly competitive and dynamic.  Companies that offer products or services, strive to compete with its peers and try to excel in at least one of these 3 core competencies: i) Operational excellence, ii) Product excellence, and iii) Customer experience excellence.   The competition is so intense that only the most innovative company, in the group, achieves and maintains the top position from a business point of view. They have to fight harder and harder to deliver excellence - both consistently and continuously.

For this, companies go agile, differentiate and innovate in various aspects – including, ensuring of high quality.  In this journey to deliver excellence, they have to adopt the revolutionary path.  

Let us take for example, the smartphone business and see how this industry has transformed during the last 3 to 5 years.  Companies that were famous for high quality mobile phone products (say, Nokia and Motorola) are no longer doing prominent business when compared to the new generation companies such as Apple and Samsung. Don't you think Apple and Samsung have done something revolutionary to bring in this change? I believe, they did!

Apple and Samsung, for instance, have adopted newer techniques and methodologies to deliver high quality innovative products.  Novel and better products are pushed to market in shorter spans of time.  Every new version of a smart phone comes out with newer and amazing features. These companies could rise from “almost no existence”, a few years back, to “Top 1 or 2” position in a short span of 3 to 5 years.

Now, let us look at the education services business and how it is transforming this industry. Top universities are going online, and through social media, to provide high quality educational services, and actively participating in MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses).   

Many online courses are provided free-of-cost (Example: Coursera).  They find newer innovative ways to provide high quality education to the customers (student community). They could best leverage the social media, high speed internet network and cloud services to deliver this high quality education.  It has become important for these universities to expand and cater to the customers (students) located around the world.  Don't you consider this a revolutionary change?  

Stackoverflow.com is another innovative attempt to deliver high quality collaboration services - i.e., providing best answers to many great questions from a large set of people. Stackoverflow is a Q&A (Question and Answers) site that provides answers to questions, in a democratic way, on a plethora of topics asked by people across the world.  This crowdsourcing effort focusses on continuous improvement of the quality of questions and answers.  Users improve both questions and answers using the options provided -  "Improve this question" or "Improve this answer".  My experience has been very good in getting the right (good quality) answers to many of technical questions at Stackoverflow.com.   

We all are running so fast in today's world and can observe that the world is moving faster and faster in all aspects. Thus, Quality also has to adjust its pace and take untraveled routes to achieve newer objectives and enable innovation - through the revolutionary path. 

How ASQ Uses Social Media to Spread the Voice of Quality

Social Media is the most happening buzzword of today.  When we talk about social, people think about FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogger, WhatsApp, Hangout etc.  Going social certainly helps one to improve their knowledge - learn something new, add newer thoughts and dimensions to an existing idea, share information with others etc.  Social Media supports both offline (say, blogger) and online (example, Google Hangout)  interactions.  Both these modes have its own advantages and disadvantages.   Recent focus is more towards lively and real-time online interactions. 

Knowing the power of blogging, during 2012, ASQ embarked on an initiative called Influential Voices, wherein a select set of bloggers (ASQ members) write about quality and related topics on a regular basis. This initiative, ongoing and continuously improving, has been a good success with member representation from many parts of the world(India, Ecuador, China, Malaysia, Australia, and the United States).  It has helped ASQ to spread the voice of quality all over the world in a quicker and effective manner.  As part of this initiative, every month, the ASQ CEO writes on a key quality topic or his experience and asks the influential voices to reflect further and publish in their personal blogs. Currently, there are 21 active and 11 influential voices that contribute towards this initiative.  The links to these blogs are also published/retweeted on a monthly basis in FaceBook and Twitter under the ASQ/influential voices user handles.  I invite you to take time to read the blogs written by these passionate bloggers.  

Moving from the offline to real-time online social media interactions, on 23rd July 2014, ASQ team conducted a live Google Hangout with the ASQ Influential Voices bloggers, including Dan Zrymiak, Jennifer Stepniowski, Edwin Garro, and Babette Ten Haken and other participants. You can Watch the Hangout or get more details. About 35 people participated in this live hangout. Participants appreciated ASQ for this novel approach to sharing and social networking in practice.

I am sure that more online social interactions are going to happen, in future, which can exponentially raise the voice of quality.  Newer initiatives such as A View from the Q Blog, ASQ TV, a newer and modern looking ASQ website, active discussions by ASQ in social forums etc., are very effective and useful to the quality community.

Last but not the least, the efforts of Julia, Communications Specialist at ASQ is highly commendable. She coordinates and motivates fellow ASQ members, bloggers to stay focused in their communication efforts to spread the voice of quality.  Thank you Julia.

Importance of Organization Focus and Vision

Bill has come up with another interesting blog post asking fellow bloggers to comment on right organization focus and vision.  He writes about his experience at the recent European Organization for Quality Annual Congress, the speeches from Professor Noriaki Kano and Mr. Ulf Gustavsson of Ikea and his visit to the Volvo automobile manufacturing factory.

One striking thing that I noticed, from Bill’s post, is the “practical” focus on quality control, customer experience and safety which are very important for an organization from today’s business perspective.  It shall be noted that Professor Kano just re-emphasized the importance of quality control and quality tools for fixing the current problem, which should be the immediate focus.  Ikea is very customer focused and clear with respect its vision – high and consistent customer experience.   Volvo’s vision is more like achieving six sigma level safety standards, by year 2020, in all automobiles it sells. 

Out of curiosity, I searched Apple’s website to understand their organization vision and focus.  Unfortunately, I could not find any reference to what I was looking for.  Interestingly, I stumbled on this article that kind of conveyed Apple’s focus from none other than Tim Cook, who took over as Apple’s leader from the legendary Steve Jobs.   Here is a quick excerpt from the article and Tim’s words were:

“We believe that we are on the face of the earth to make great products and that’s not changing. We are constantly focusing on innovating. We believe in the simple not the complex.” 

We can clearly comprehend that Apple’s focus is to make great products with continuous focus on innovation and their firm belief in simplicity.   Quite amazing and powerful focus, isn’t it?  Can we explain about delivering customer experience in a better way?  That is what Apple is!

Here is another interesting part to note from the same article, Tim said:

“We believe in deep collaboration and cross-pollination of our groups, which allow us to innovate in a way that others cannot. And frankly, we don’t settle for anything less than excellence in every group in the company, and we have the self-honesty to admit when we’re wrong and the courage to change.”

Apple’s focus on its internal customers – their employees is commendable.  They strongly believe in deep collaboration and cross-pollination which allows them to innovate which is a key differentiator from its peers.   And the greatness comes from the “self-honesty” fact that when things go wrong, they have the courage to admit that and adopt change.   

Organizational Excellence

It is no surprise that ASQ has won the Wisconsin Forward Award (WFA) for 2014.  ASQ has always been an organization committed to continuous improvement and high standards of excellence. The WFA award has just proved the leadership position of ASQ in delivering organizational excellence.  As Bill  rightly said, the WFA award has demonstrated that ASQ practices what it preaches.

I have had the opportunity to visit the ASQ Milwaukee headquarters for few workshops and meetings and meet with some ASQ Leaders and Members.  I have personally seen and experienced the process excellence and high quality while at ASQ campus.  ASQ Leaders and Members always are keen on continuous improvement and lifelong learning.

The organization that I am part of has long back embarked on an excellence program called TBEM (Tata Business Excellence Model).  TBEM is a customized adoption of the Malcolm Baldrige Model.  This model focuses on 7 core aspects - i) Leadership, ii) Strategic Planning, iii) Customer and Market Focus, iv) Measurement, Analysis and Knowledge Management, v) Workforce Focus, vi) Process Management, and vii) Business Results.  Every year, Tata group companies compete for the TBEM award and strive to improve their leadership position.  Company performance is measured in absolute points.  Companies have to achieve minimum 500 points (out of 1000) within 4 years of signing the Brand Equity and Brand Promotion (BEBP) agreement.  With continuous improvement focus, the TBEM model goes through regular and calibrated updates to stay in step with the dynamic business environment.

TBEM core values and principles are very well built into the organization's processes.  It is very much the part and parcel of every employees' work life and business transactions.  Ethics and Governance are key and all employees strictly adhere to the Tata Code of Conduct. Continuous improvement is the focus mantra; best practices and lessons learnt are shared across the organization.  Our organization is always prepared ahead-of-time for the yearly TBEM evaluation process.  The results of the evaluation are promising and the organization is continuously improving its leadership position to stay on top with respect to organizational excellence. 

Agility and Quality

Today, agility is perceived as an important quality attribute by the customer community.  Due to this, companies strive to demonstrate their agility through various ways.

Let us look at some industry segments and their focus on agility:

Telecom

• Provide real-time bill (online) to its customer
• Healthcare via smartphone (Mobile Health) - Patient-Payer-Payee-Pharmacy-Provider sync-up
• Variety of Services over a cloud

Retail

• Real-time offers and discounts
• Quicker product delivery options - 24 hour delivery
• Omni-channel customer experience

Entertainment

• Real-time Pay-per-view shows in HD format via variety of devices
• Streaming of a new movie releases, NFL matches live through mobile devices

Banking

• Mobile banking and up-to-date account management
• Quicker financial transactions - application, sanctions via smartphone and other mobile devices

Agility is thus very important today as it is looked by customers as a very important quality attribute, than ever before.

Improve Quality through use of Gamification

Gamification is the concept of applying game concepts and game elements (Points, Leaderboards, Badges etc) to non-game scenarios. Now a days, gamification is used as a tool to improve quality. Let us look at an example here.

Stackoverflow.com is a website that simply deals with questions and answers.  It is a good site meant for collaboration.  Users of this website ask questions on a range of topics and other users come and provide answers to these questions.  It is as simple as this.

But stackoverflow.com has effectively used gamification as a tool to improve the quality of questions, answers posted, participation, collaboration etc.  Let us look at some features of this site that use gamification to improve quality:

1. Post a question - A user posts a new question.  Another user come and edits the question to improve the quality of the question posted by the other user.  Stackoverflow.com has provided a feature to "Improve the question" posted by other users.  This is a great feature that improves the quality of a question posted.  This is a very unique and powerful feature.

2. Post an answer - Another user (very often an expert) can answer to a question.  Many other users can either post a "new answer" or "improve an existing answer (posted by another user)".  This is another practical scenario of a collaboration process that focuses on continuous improvement of quality of question and answers posted.

3.  Users are seen passionate with their participation and they earn "reputation points" and a variety of "badges" based on their effective participation.  Reputation points and the type of badges they have earned convey the quality of users of this site.    

4. Each question and answer gets a vote based on the usefulness perceived by each user.  Each vote carry 1 point.  The more the number of votes, the more valuable the question and answers are.

5. Questions can be marked as "favorite" question.  A little star icon displays "the total number of users" that have favorited the question.

We have to admit that stackoverflow.com has brilliantly used gamification to track and improve the quality of collaboration and learning.  It has used the right mix of qualitative and quantitative measures to "continuously" improve quality.

Remembering the Great Leaders of Quality

This article is a tribute to the 10 greatest leaders of quality and a brief snapshot of their key contribution towards quality.     

1. Edward Deming (1900 to 1993)

• Best known for the P-D-C-A cycle (Plan-Do-Check-Act)
• Brought significant improvements to Japanese manufacturing
• Other quality and management philosophies and thoughts from him were - i) The Deming System of Profound Knowledge, ii) The 14 points for Transformation of Management, iii) Seven Deadly Diseases, iv) The PDSA cycle, v) The Red Bead Experiment, and, vi) The Funnel Experiment.

2. Joseph Moses Juran (1904 to 2008)

• First to apply Pareto principle to Quality Management
• First to add Human Dimension to Quality Management
• First to write about Cost of Poor Quality (later popularized by James Harrington of IBM)
• The Juran Trilogy, an approach to cross-functional management - The three managerial processes: quality planning, quality control and quality improvement
• Brought various Japanese quality principles (example: Quality Circles) to the US

3. Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856 to 1915)

• Father of Scientific Management and Efficiency Movement
• Early proponent of benchmarking and business process re-design
• Scientific management theory helped the upcoming of Total Quality Control and Re-engineering

4.  Shigeo Shingo (1909 to 1990)

• Contributor of the famous TPS - Toyota Production System, that focused on reducing over-burden,  inconsistency,  and to eliminate waste
• Creator of concepts such as Poka-yoke or mistake-proofing, Zero Quality Control, The SMED system etc

5. Taiichi Ohno (1912 to 1990)

• Father of TPS - Toyota Production System which later became Lean Manufacturing
• Devised the 7 wastes (muda in Japanese) in Lean
• Proponent of JIT - Just-In-Time system
• Developed the Kanban concept

6.  Sakichi Toyoda (1867 to 1930)

• Implemented automation (Jidoka in Japanese)
• Developed the root cause analysis technique, 5-Whys

7. Kaoru Ishikawa (1915 to 1989)

• Introduced the concept of Quality Circles
• Developed the statistical tool - Fishbone Cause and Effect Diagram
• Stressed the importance of an internal customer

8. Armand V. Feigenbaum (1920)

• Devised the Total Quality Control concept
• Innovator in the area of the Quality Cost Management - Costs of prevention, appraisal, and internal and external failure 

9. Genichi Taguchi (1924 to 2012)

• Applied statistics to improve the quality of manufactured good - through famous Taguchi Methods
• Researched further on design of experiments
• Contributed towards fields such as product design and manufacturing, such as sales process engineering

10.  Philip B Crosby (1926 to 2001)

• Initiated the Zero Defects concept
• Conceptualized Quality Management Maturity Grid

I believe that these godfathers of quality have provided significant contributions for the mankind to live a high-quality life. 

Remembering them and sharing their key contributions, I trust, is a great way to celebrate the World Quality Month.

ISI Mark of India - Synonym for Quality, Safety and Reliability

November is the World Quality Month.  This probably is the best time of the year to write about the how a customer, in India, gets the ability to choose to buy a high quality product.  What quality certification do they look for in a product before purchase?   How do product companies in India guarantee quality?  What are the quality standards they adhere to?  These are some interesting questions for which we will look for answers here.

In India, certain products carry a certification logo that says 'ISI'.  People in India refer to this logo as "ISI Mark" and Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) provides this product certification.  ISI stands for 'Indian Standards Institution', which is the institution that certifies that a product is of good quality and meets mandated specifications.   ISI mark is mandatory for certain products, for example,  kitchen appliances like pressure cookers, electrical appliances such as water heaters, wiring cables, milk powder, masonry cement, clinical thermometers etc.

The ISI mark provides the customer the guarantee of quality, safety and reliability.  Companies adhere to certification procedures and obtain licenses to use the ISI mark.  Certification application procedures are of 2 types - normal and standard.  Standard certification process is a quicker certification process applicable to certain products while normal certification process is an exhaustive process conducted by a BIS officer.  It is to be noted that BIS laboratories adhere to ISO/IEC Guide 17025:1999 quality standards. 

Overseas applicants and Indian Importers are also granted license for use of ISI mark under certain product categories.   

BIS provides another interesting quality certification - specifically for products such as gold jewels and gold coins.  This is popularly known as 'BIS Gold Hallmark'.  Gold products with BIS Hallmark logo carry a premium over non-certified gold products.  Purity of gold is guaranteed with BIS Hallmark certification.  BIS is the designated agency by Indian Government for providing the BIS Hallmark certification.   The BIS Hallmarking Scheme is aligned to the International criteria on hallmarking (Vienna Convention 1972).  

BIS acts as a third-party certification provider that guarantees quality, safety and reliability for various consumer products including gold.  People in India are very cautious to look for ISI mark and BIS Hallmark when purchasing  products.  The ISI mark has become a symbol of trust and provides peace of mind for the people in India and it is a synonym for high quality. 

How a common man measure quality?

Paul has asked a simple-looking question in the October 2013 blog post - "What new fields or disciplines could most reap the benefits of quality tools and techniques"?  Paul's question is focused on application of quality beyond 'manufacturing' - be it in, say, 'athletics', 'customer service', or 'education'. 

Quality is not easily quantifiable for a common man. He cannot apply quality tools and techniques so easily to measure quality.  Most consumers get to measure quality using simple qualitative parameters. 

For example, say, in a WalMart store, people easily identify the best quality apples from the assortment displayed in various aisles.  Most people can measure value of products on sale.  Thus, value becomes an important aspect of quality, as certain high quality products (say, apples) are available at relatively cheaper prices. 

Let us look at healthcare.  We prefer to go to certain hospitals or pharmacy stores and even prefer to visit certain doctors to others.  Why?  We, somehow, perceive high quality - another qualitative measurement.  The perception may be due to the high availability of products, proximity to work or home, or, even a particular salesperson.   Thus, perception becomes another aspect of quality.  Good perception, most often, is a result of high quality products and services offered.

Here is yet another example.  This example may be applicable only for people who commute regularly to work using public transport (especially bus) services.  Many times, people prefer to ride certain buses/routes.  Most times, it is the bus driver that is the reason for this preference.  The driving skill and high degree of professionalism are some of the qualitative aspects that help the driver to deliver high quality services.  So, skill and character plays a key role in delivering quality.

There are quality tools and methodologies available for quality practitioners to measure the quality service levels quantitatively.    But people, the real customers, can measure quality (high or low), relatively easily and accurately, by looking at certain aspects of quality such as value, perception, skill, character etc. 

I would invite to you take a look at the work done by ASQ on service quality.