Managing quality: The transition from reactive to proactive strategies

Product quality constitutes a highly crucial component of product design, directly affecting consumer loyalty and company profitability. Historically, manufacturing enterprises have relied on the reactive approach of 'inspecting quality' into a product so it may 'conform' to design specifications. While this approach has its own advantages, its principal limitation lies in the manufacturers' implicit resignation to the fact that quality needs to be inspected since it cannot be built into product design at the design stage. However, there has been a gradual, yet definite transition from a reactive to a proactive strategy to managing quality by incorporating design techniques that do away with the largely unproductive inspection process. Several leading manufacturing enterprises have been successful in entirely eliminating the need to inspect by adopting a proactive approach to product design. This paper examines and reviews the need and strategic importance of this transition.