Quality, Delivery, or Price?
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While no printer ever came out and said it to me directly, I always realized that when I bought printing services I could have any two out of the three deliverables of quality, delivery time or price. I'd plan ahead so the printer could gang my work with someone else's (while giving me a longer delivery time) in order to have the quality I wanted at the price I was willing to pay.
Gary Jaquess made the same point recently when he described the negotiations he had to go through with the Japanese parent of an American manufacturer in order to construct a new manufacturing facility on time, on budget - and with the quality the parent demanded. In Japan, their mass transit system is so good they don't need parking spaces around any of their facilities. They're mandated by law here, something that had to be carefully communicated to the home office, causing a delay. The Japanese think in "tsubo's" not square feet. A tsubo is a two dimensional measure based upon the size of a tatami mat in a typical Japanese home. It took a while for everyone to become conversant in just what a tsubo was, and how to quickly make the conversion to understand price per square foot.
Most interestingly, recognizing that lots of analysis is done by the parent organization before the final decision is made results in the ability to immediately begin implementation, a process that is different from the American method of making a decision and then modifying to to fit new discoveries found later.
It all still comes back to quality, delivery and price. If you want all three - and who doesn't - then you'd better design a process that takes all three topics into account. Over a series of projects constructing manufacturing facilities in the northwest, Jaquess perfected the ability to communicate in advance to ascertain real intent, decide just what quality was required, and, finally, plan together so things went smoothly during a long prcess of agreement, construction and manufacturing.
Reference
Jaquess, Garrison, W. Value Is In the Eyes of the Receiver. Productive Workplace Resources. 2004. [Handout for a presentation to the Orange County chapter of the Association for Strategic Planning.]