Do many companies simply use quality as window dressing and a sales tool without truly practicing it?
We have had clients who, upon entry into their business and talking to them about establishing quality systems, say to us, “Just get us a nice red, leather-bound book with all of the information in it, and we’ll put it on the shelf here. That’s really all we want. We don’t really care about it, but we want to be able to show someone when they come into the business that, oh yes, we have quality, and we’ll pull out the book and show them the book.” But that’s it, and it isn’t real. It’s too bad, but we see too much of that. One particular company I can tell you about. As I talked to the president of the company, we were taking a tour of his facility. Through the tour I saw an area where there was quite a bit of scrap product. I asked him what kind of scrap ratios they had, and he said, “We run somewhere around 27 percent scrap ratio, 25 to 27 percent.” And I said, do you realize that’s enormously high? And he said, “Well, we’re doing very well. Our order books are filled, our profitabil
