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Dr. A. Blanton Godfrey is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Juran Institute, Inc. Juran Institute now does business in over 50 countries and has offices in Amsterdam, Madrid, Sydney, London and Toronto as well as in the United States.

Prior to joining Juran Institute in 1987, Dr. Godfrey was Head of the Quality Theory and Technology Department of AT&T Bell Laboratories. He was recently in India to launch a business partnership with the New Delhi-based Institute of Quality Limited and also to conduct a series of seminars on Quality. Excerpts from an exclusive interview to Business Line:

Q. There is always talk about the various cultural patterns and how different cultures deal with quality management...

A. I wouldn't say there are different business cultures in different countries. There are, however, distinct cultures in different companies. IBM in India is the same as IBM in the US. It's not like HP in India. There are only company cultures...you name a company and I can tell you if the company is from Argentina, Brazil, Japan or the United States.

Q. We find that in India, the quality management culture stops at a point where the company gets its ISO 9000 certification, as though the certification is an end and not the means to further improvement... any comments on that?

A. Unfortunately that is true...conforming to standards is a very weak definition, because people assume that they have the right standards and often they don't. They assume they know what the customer wants...standards are often from five years ago regardless of what the market needs now...it is almost impractical to get feedback constantly from the customers and your competitors which means you have to watch all the directions....and customers can walk away so quick and I think it is just really hard to create a quality system which works based on conformance to strict quality standards.

Q. There seems to be another measure of quality, i.e., quality is the price of non-conformance...

A. Well...one of the measures which is very useful is the cost of our quality and it is a good measurement to know where your opportunities are on the cost side. Knowing that you know where to put your eggs. If know that you have a 30 per cent scrap and it is costing 30 per cent of your profits per year, reducing that by half perhaps increases your profit by 15 per cent, that is pretty exciting and that is very useful information to know. It is the not the definition of quality but it is a good estimate of the size of your opportunities on the cost side.

Q. And where does benchmarking come into all this?

A. Benchmarking is a very good way to break out of the box of your thinking...and to see what is possible, especially if you benchmark outside your own industry...like back in those days at Bell Labs, when we were trying to improve the design cycle and make it faster, one of the people came up with a radical idea and said `let's benchmark the New York Times', which produces a new product everyday. And we did not think about that and when we went and looked, they do not produce a new product everyday, of course, as 90 per cent of the paper has been done two weeks ago, their advertisements and all that...the front page is done the previous night. Lot of it is standardised...they don't change their shape everyday, they don't change the pages. So we went back and standardised our circuit packs...and we learnt that a lot of things could be done way ahead of time and still create branded fresh products for the market. So, if you start benchmarking by people who do something well and maybe, do it very differently, because they have been in a different market or benchmark somebody for whom this is very important, it may not be very important to you, so you haven't worked on it very hard but it is the number one thing for them. So you would expect they had learnt how to do that...now you know how they do and you copy it. So it is really raising the thought and when you benchmark, you know not only what they achieved but also how they did it.

Q. About ISO 9000-9002?

A. It is like the rule book. It allows you to play the game and it doesn't say anything about whether you win. I just says you won't be thrown off the cricket pitch because you did something wrong. It says we know how to create a quality system and we have documented it. It says nothing about your competitive performance, it says nothing about whether you are going to make any money, it says nothing about whether you are going to be here next year. Companies must realise this. It just allows you in many cases to bid. It doesn't say whether you are going to get the bid.

Q. Any comments on the quality movement in India?

A. Right now India is going through a huge transition from a time when you had more customers and you needed products, to a situation in which you have more products and you need customers. Quality is really going to be a major issue. Because when customers have a choice, they exercise their choice with a vengeance. It is already happening here in the car market and it is catching up fast in other markets as well, such as the airlines. On a scale of 1 through 10, I would rate the quality movement in the country somewhere between 3 and 5. It is very hard to be motivated without a lot of pressure and there hasn't been a lot of pressure until recently and so with the market opening up, you see some very good companies come in.

The world class people are here now and some are getting started. Things are going to change very, very fast. But it definitely has not hit every company or every industry. It is going to take a while for some of them to wake up. After they even want to change, it is going to take some time...so they have to explore different options and understand what the choices are and get really serious.