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The customer or consumer plays a very important role in achieving quality, for it is the customer who defines the quality of the product. If the customer likes the product and is satisfied with it the way it functions, then the probability is high that they will be willing to buy the product again in the future, indicating that you have a quality product. However, quality can also be achieved through innovation. Quality is not static; rather, it is an ongoing process. For example, a given product may be of great quality today – but if no further innovative improvements are made, it may become obsolete in the future and consequently lose its market share. It should be obvious that the required innovation can only be defined by the producer.

The customer is not in a position to tell how a product should look like 5 or 10 years from now. For example, five decades ago, a customer could not imagine electric cars or self‐driven cars, or small computers replacing the huge computers that used to occupy entire rooms. The customer is only the judge of the product in its current form. In other words, a concern about quality begins with the customer, but the producer must carry it into the future. The producer or their team has to incorporate their innovative ideas at the design stage. This is called continuous improvement or quality forever. We will have a brief look at this concept later in this chapter.

It is important to note that a customer can be internal or external. For example, a paper mill could be an internal or external customer of a pulp mill. If both the paper and the pulp mill are owned by the same organization, then the paper mill is an internal customer; otherwise, it is an external customer. Similarly, various departments are internal customers of the Human Resources department. Another example is that students from various departments of a university taking a course from another department are internal customers, whereas a part‐time student from outside the university is an external customer. In such cases, the company or organization should not assume that if its internal customers are satisfied, external customers are also automatically satisfied. The needs of external customers may be entirely different from those of internal customers, and the company must strive to meet both sets of needs. Furthermore, the goal of a company or an organization should be that all customers are satisfied not only for the moment but forever.

In summary, to achieve quality and competitiveness, you must first achieve quality today and then continue to improve the product for the future by introducing innovative ideas. To do this, an organization must take the following steps:

1 Make the customer its top priority. In other words, it should be a customer‐focused organization.

2 Make sure the customer is fully satisfied and, as a result, becomes a loyal customer. A loyal customer is the one who will always give reliable feedback.

3 Create an environment that provides the most innovative products and has as its focus quality improvement as an ongoing process.

4 Take data‐driven action to achieve quality and innovation. That is, the organization must collect information systematically, following appropriate sampling techniques to obtain data from internal as well as external customers about their needs and analyzing it to make necessary improvements. This process should be repeated continuously.