The Hindu : Business : CII summit opens with Premji's prescription for quality

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Nov 26, 2004

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Business

CII summit opens with Premji's prescription for quality

By Our Staff Reporter

BANGALORE, NOV. 25. The Confederation of Indian Industry's (CII) 12th annual quality summit opened here with some five prescriptions for quality that kept Azim Premji, Chairman of Wipro, and his company in good stead. Mr. Premji, whose company exports software services, headquartered in Bangalore, gave the inaugural address of the summit, here on Thursday.

That the CII and the Exim Bank could not find one company to merit their quality award, the CII-EXIM Bank Award for quality for the second consecutive year, perhaps says something about the need for such prescriptions as well. Some 43 companies were short listed for `site visits' by a jury comprising former vigilance commissioner, N. Vittal, among others. While about half of them got commendations and certificates, none made the grade for the award itself, last won by Infosys Technologies in 2002.

First, among what Mr. Premji called his "tenets" was that quality should be seen through the eyes of the customer. A theoretical agreement was easy on this but in execution, people tended to use whatever definition of what the customer wants suited them, he said.

Second, Quality is a journey. So don't harp on certifications. Get them, for they do serve a purpose, but move on. Getting "a sense of arrival" was "dangerous" he said. Three, quality had to be an integral part of every part of an organisation. "Imagine an intensive care unit with a waiting room like a garbage dump. You wouldn't want to go there even if the need arose," he said.

Four, "be careful of what you wish for, especially with metrics." For instance, it isn't unusual for some companies to set the metric of `customer complaint reduction.' Since, metrics do drive behaviour, such a metric was often met by the "simple and effective behaviour of simply refusing to record the complaints." This very effectively reduces customer complaints but "destroys customer equity," he said.

Finally, quality was like integrity, and therefore non-negotiable. "It is the only way to be and behave," for not only is it a moral compulsion, but it also translates into immediate economic value by fostering trust with all stakeholders a company interacts with.

The summit concludes on November 27 and in addition to talks on quality in management, has three parallel meets on healthcare, retail services and financial services.

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