The Real Impact of Poor Quality

Quality affects a company in a variety of ways, from productivity and profitability to customer satisfaction and public perception. In addition, quality affects the overall operating costs of a company. Focusing on quality helps keep a company strong in all areas.

In this article I highlight three effects on how poor quality can affect your organization.

Influencing Customer Satisfaction

Quality has a direct bearing on customer satisfaction. If a company produces a quality product, satisfied customers will rank that company higher in surveys than companies that fail to provide quality products or services. In addition, dissatisfied customers are more vocal in their criticisms of a company with quality problems. Various websites will rank different companies according to customer satisfaction and quality products. Poor companies may get an initial sale of a product or service but it will not create repeat customers.

Causing Problems with Productivity

Poor quality costs a company a significant amount of money in terms of productivity problems. If a company uses low-quality parts, systems break down, regardless of any high-quality parts also used. Low-quality parts can cause mechanical breakdowns, as well as work slowdowns or even stoppages. If quality is not a proactive measure, employees will spend their time on inefficient process and fixing incidents on a regular basis. It is crucial to find out which processes are inefficient and how to improve them.

Impacting Company's Profitability

Poor quality can have a significant impact on a company’s profitability. While using less expensive parts and equipment might cut costs in the short term, the long-term effects might be far more expensive. This could also be a lack of quality in human, physical, financial or knowledge factors that are needed to perform business processes.

Good quality increases profitability. When employees are engaged in a work environment in which teamwork is emphasized and where quality products are the goal, the work environment flows more smoothly than one in which quality is an afterthought.

The Solution

Investing in proper quality control is key to reduce poor quality. Focusing on quality can help a business maintain a satisfied customer base. When focusing on quality, it must be a team effort, with everyone within the company committed to implementing any quality changes managers mandate.  Ultimately, the cost of working with an ineffective system are exponentially higher than the cost of working with a proper quality management platform.