quality risks

State-of-the-art risk assessments either overestimate or underestimate both probability and impact of quality risks. Misleading assessments can be avoided by modeling quality risks as conflicts instead of defects. Refocusing requires a transition from production approaches to interaction approaches covering several clusters of relevant actors in quality management. Customer involvement e.g. as a co-producer not only supports customer satisfaction and retention but also reduces producers’ costs since risk identification becomes more valid and risk sharing is enabled.

Due to the global harmonization of product quality it is essential for a firm’s success to pursue a quality strategy that balances the trade-off between customer satisfaction and quality costs. For selecting an appropriate quality strategy it would be necessary to include risk considerations and customer satisfaction into strategy evaluation approaches. However, current methods do not integrate these customer related effects. This article presents an approach for calculating the value added by quality strategies integrating risk considerations and customer satisfaction as a major success factor.