Richard Levitt, director of quality at the $38 billion information technology company Hewlett Packard, will be killing several birds with the same stone on his first visit to India. For one, he will be talking about the meaning of quality his pet subject through most of his week- long visit. For another, he will be clicking away still-life scenes in India. Levitt, a black and white photography enthusiast, recently held a one-man show of his photographs in the US.
And ifif this agenda were not enough, My wife is a student of Indian art and this visit is an ideal opportunity for her to study temple art first hand, he says.
But Levitts main focus remains quality. In 1993, along with a group of hand-picked professionals in HP, he set out to find a better set of tools and methods to bring the quality experience to their customers.
We set out to reinvent quality totally, says Levitt. And this was an imperative because the technology of quality itself seems to have remained frozen over the years, failing to keep pace with the rapid change in technology elsewhere in the business environment, he adds.
A major question that he was faced with was: how does todays virtual organisation manage quality? We are used to thinking about quality in terms of products and features but it is much more. It is the whole experience of the customer that is crucial, Levitt feels.
It was also crucial for Hewlett Packard to overcome the problem of implementing this quality paradigm. We use the same suppliers for components that other major companies do. So our work lies in managing the entire virtual chain of suppliers, dealers, distributors, resellers and retailers in a manner that is better than anyone else, Levitt explains.
This poses another challenge: the enormity of the task. The company has close to 700,000 people in its virtual network who work outside the companys direct sphere of influence. These people are the crucial last or first, depending on how you look at it link with the customer. They determine what the customer experiences.
As a result, HP has to constantly train these thousands of people. Adding to the complexity is the 50 per cent turnover rate in this vast network, so the training has to begin all over again with new people. HP hopes to overcome this problem with its Quality 1 on 1 initiative.
