How Do You Define Quality?

We caught up with Waleed Ashoo, CEO and President of LithExcel Service Providers, on his return from the PODi Las Vegas conference and posed the following question to him:

Peter Drucker has said, “Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier put in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for.” While there are standards to measure quality on the offset print side, an example being ISO 8254, no standards exist for the digital print side. Should and or could there be a quality standard for digital be developed?




“Standards beyond color matching exist. Because digital equipment varies, individual manufacturers have developed proprietary standards that address material conformance and visual attributes for their specific presses. Unlike an offset printing which has been around for hundreds of years, digital is relatively young industry that continues to evolve,” said Ashoo.

“Quality is more than standards and guidelines. Standardized output and guidelines do not address customer satisfaction, strengthening supplier partnerships, fostering of an atmosphere of continuous improvement or encouraging quality as a way of thinking and a way in which people interact and work together,” said Ashoo.

Wikipedia states that “..the quality of a product or service refers to the perception of the degree to which the product or service meets the customer’s expectations. Furthermore, quality has no specific meaning unless related to a specific function and/or object. Quality is a perceptual, conditional and a somewhat subjective attribute.” Customers define quality based on their entire experience, which is “...the aggregate of all the touch points that they have with the company’s product and services....”

“In business quality is generally defined as the conformity of a product to a specification, code or guideline. In the world of the consumer, however, quality is defined by how one product or service compares to another in the market,” said Ashoo. “I’d add three possible outcomes to this definition of quality: the product either meets the customer’s expectations, the product exceeds expectations, or the product does not meet expectations.

How do you measure quality then? “You can’t measure it by numbers alone,” said Ashoo. “You need to look at everything: market share, customer satisfaction, how you rank in comparison to your competition, employee morale, cost of waste, efficiently use of capital, and levels of productivity. It’s a measure of all the elements that make up a business and getting all the indicators moving in the right direction at the same time, which is not easy.”

How do you measure quality? Should an industry digital output standard be developed beyond manufacturers’ proprietary standards and ISO13660/19751, which limited to B&W digital office equipment. Let us know.

To learn more, go to the Printing Industry Center at Rochester Institute of Technology.