Total Quality Management and Just in Time in Trade Offs

When Skinner first introduced the ideas of trade-offs and focus, it was generally held that there was an unavoidable trade-off between quality and cost. A high quality product or service would necessarily be more expensive than one of lower quality. Since then, and following the pioneering operations of Japanese industries, developments such as total quality management (TQM) and just-in-time (JIT) operations have been widely adopted. The result has been that today's world-class operations can routinely produce high quality products and services at relatively low cost, and quickly. In many markets, quality is now considered to be an order qualifier rather than an order winner. Today's operational meaning of quality concerns the extent to which a product or service conforms to the specified requirements.