Quality: From Customer Needs to Customer Satisfaction

Aimed at academic and industry courses teaching Total Quality Management, this text shows how to handle the quality improvement process during all steps of a product's life cycle, from customer needs to customer satisfaction, as well as in the support process of an organization. The authors describe philosophies as well as mathods and techniques, the history as well as the future, planning and development as well as manufacturing, and quality for services as well as for goods. The text links quality with the market, productivity, logistics, and investments in a win-win strategy. The up-to-date treatment of current industry topics includes: quality in the supply process, service quality, customer satisfaction (formation, measurement, committment), and leadership for quality (improvement programs, company assessments, quality awards, and learning organizations). There is a twelve-chapter treatment of the quantitative aspects of quality and an appendix of basic statistics.