TQM: A SUSTAINABLE, COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

The levers to accomplishing a sustainable competitive advantage are many; but if one were to delve deeper, you would find that quality forms the guiding thread across every internal touchpoint.

- Dr. Jairam Varadaraj

A crisis has a way of concentrating the mind. Conventionally, a lapse in quality could translate to mas-sive recalls and even lawsuits. But despite their impact, these events are just a sliver of the full scope. If an organisation is to survive and remain ahead of its competitors and predators, it will need to build differentiation by providing specific value to their customer base. Creating and sustaining a competitive advantage is one way of achieving this goal i.e., the ability to possess some advantage relative to their competitors. And there exist several routes to achieving this – via building a cost advantage, which is fairly straightforward. A value advantage, where an organisation provides a differentiated offering perceived to be of superior value, or via developing a focus advantage i.e, focus on a specific market niche with a breakthrough tailored offering. The levers to accomplishing a sustainable competitive advantage are many; but if one were to delve deeper, you would find that quality forms the guiding thread across every internal touchpoint.

Indeed, it is important to keep the rare disaster from happening. But for organisations well focused on building a sustainable competitive advantage in the marketplace, simply reacting to quality problems is no longer tenable. For example - quality, cost, delivery (QCD) is a ‘three-dimensional’ approach and if a problem exists with one dimension, the others will inevitably suffer. Being good at quality is therefore barely sufficient – they need to be smart about it as well. In effect, quality is no longer mainly a question of bottom-line savings but of top-line revenue generation.