Rodger on Quality and Cost

An excerpt from the 1991 Pacific Telecommunication Partners meeting, Maui, Hawaii

"How do you get managers to pay attention to the detail of improvement? Now, if you recall the relationship chart, one of the things that we were trying to do was no surprises. In billing we found that we were giving our customers lots of surprises (laughter). Now, the way to talk to managers about, um, something like this is to put it in their terms. Now the language of management is the language of dollars, the finance language. So, using the concept of the cost of poor quality, we found this was costing us 20 million dollars a year. So, it didn't take much for management to understand that by reducing the surprised for the customers, they were also going to substantially reduce the cost that handling those enquiries that those surprises caused."

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