A hArd-hitting - Plantin

Not at All Bad
if you ask 10 people what quality means, you normally get 10 different answers. the only thing
they agree on is that quality costs a great deal of money – especially in its absence when the
complaints start to mount up. Whereas customers vote with their feet if suppliers fail to meet
their requirements, hardly any are prepared to pay more if quality is better than expected.
Between these two extremes, print shops have scope for maneuver that can be put to good
use. so what exactly is quality? is it even possible to give a succinct answer? is quality limited
to technical aspects such as register accuracy and color consistency? or is it simply what the
customer expects? the quotes below may provide a few clues.
“the quality of print products depends largely on the quality and characteristics of
the original supplied by the customer.”
print shop profile on the internet
“Quality doesn’t mean that particularly high-standard or technically complex products
have to be produced, simply that the products that customers order should be
supplied without error.”
ramón sotelo, weimar, bauhaus university, germany
“some 20 to 40 percent of the costs incurred by companies without a quality planning
system are generated dealing with chronic quality problems.”
josef m. juran, former business consultant specializing in quality management
“a lack of quality reflects a lack of integrity.”
robert pirsig, american philosopher and author
“a product is not quality because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money,
as manufacturers typically believe. this is incompetence. Customers pay only
for what is of use to them and gives them value. nothing else constitutes quality.”
peter f. drucker, author and management consultant
“Quality means doing it right when no-one is looking.”
henry ford
“Quality is free. What costs money is the unquality things – all the actions that
involve not doing jobs right the first time.”
philip b. crosby, founder of the zero defect approach
“overall impression, level of difficulty, and technical merit of the print job, plus
factors such as dot definition, ink density, register accuracy, format, grammage,
screen width, stitching, and die-cutting.”
sappi printer of the year evaluation criteria for award-winning work
“the bottom line is that making a defective product costs more than double the
amount it would have cost had it been made properly.”
avedis donabedian, american scientist
Spotlight
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