Quality not negotiable: Premji

Wipro chairman Azim Premji has stressed the importance of quality as a non-negotiable ingredient of any business. "Quality, like integrity, is simply non-negotiable," Premji told the delegates of the 12th CII Quality Summit, in Bangalore on Thursday.

Highlighting some of his "key tenets of quality", Premji said, "The simple truth is that quality must be measured only by the eyes of the customer. While it is easy to get a theoretical agreement on this issue, when it comes to real world execution, people and organisations can use any definition that is convenient for what the customer wants."

Delivering as per customer expectations is a moving target and this target shift is driven by changing customer needs, evolving markets and competition resetting the bar.

Premji explained that the two deeply embedded concepts within quality are consistency and continuos improvement.

"Quality is a journey and not a destination. Too many times I have seen the sense of having 'arrived'. This is very dangerous. People must not have a sense of having accomplished the mission. It is not about delivering defect-free solutions to the customer, but it is about quality in every process, every output and every endeavor of the organisation."

Stressing that certification of achievements is an important means to measure the standards of quality, Premji cautioned that one has to set the right set of metrics and measurements in the first place.

In this context, he said, "It has not been unusual in some organisations to see the goal on the metric of 'Customer Complaint Reduction' being met by the simple and effective behaviour of simply refusing to record the complaints. We have had this problem in our organisation too. This very effectively reduces customer complaints but destroys all customer loyalty."