Are Service & Production Quality Two Sides of the Same Coin? (be careful how you answer)

I suspect most readers will instinctively answer, “No.” Production quality refers to meeting a normative standard with as little deviation as possible. Service quality means meeting customer needs and expectations, which are all over the lot. So they’re not only not two sides of the same coin. But they’re different currencies. They just don’t equate.

But here’s a catch, at least for process professionals. You can’t answer “No” yet still maintain we should use the same process design approaches to achieve both a fixed standard and a highly variable “non-standard” – at least not rationally. But too often traditionally trained production process people, anxious to move into the customer process world, fall into “Maslow’s trap.”

“If the only tool you have is a hammer, than all the world tends to look like a nail”