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This article is targeting CEO, entrepreneurs, and other top managers at companies that are NOT growing. If your company has sustained growing in both sales and profits , you already know what I am about to tell you because company can not sustain growth without a good quality system.

Other articles on this site have hinted at the fact that there is more to building a quality product than just getting the ISO 9001:2000 certification. ISO 9000 is only one element to building a quality product, the real key a growing company is to continuous improvement your products and services.

A quality product will cost less to manufacture in the long run.
If you have a quality product, the company can spend less on sales and marketing because they will get repeat business and not have to keep finding new customer that have not been burned yet. This reduction in sales and marketing should more than offset the additional cost of maintaining a manufacturing engineering staff that can improve the quality of the products. Most small companies do not understand this point, and thus they stay small companies.

As an example, two companies started making industrial flow meters in the same small warehouse in Boulder, Colorado in the early 1970s. One company focused on making limited number of products but making them very high quality, the second company focusing of making every technology of meter with a minimum emphasis on quality. The second company found some niches where there was no competition so their customer had no other good option. After about 30 years the first company (known for their high quality) grew to about 10 times the size of the other company (know for high failure rates).

So CEOs, if you want to have sustainable growth, put your money in manufacturing engineering.

Manufacturing Engineering can use continuous improvement to make a great product that people will come back for. This can be done with or without ISO 9000. ISO 9000 will try to push the company into changing their culture to be quality oriented and continuous improvement but there is cost associated with maintaining a certification.

Don't think short term and spend all your money on marketing, trying to find new customers so you can ship them a bad product and never see them again. If you want to know why some companies don't grow that look at your quality plan.

Why Focus on Quality? - Growth (sales and profits)!!!!!