In the B2B/B2G high-tech sector it is vital to innovate and to offer products and services that are if possible more advanced or with better performance than those of the competition.
But beyond the innovative aspect, quality must be irreproachable and this must be done consistently over time because products are often intended to last a long time both on the markets and with customers. The latter will find it very difficult to forgive quality defects because they will cause serious problems in their own operations.
The costs incurred by a customer as a result of a disruption to its operations or business, such as the cost of an oil rig shutdown or a plant shutdown, even if temporary, may be out of all proportion to the price of the failed item.
Can you imagine an airline replacing a computer in an Airbus following a failure and having to ground a plane because the new computer is faulty while its stock is limited? The client companies of course put procedures in place to protect themselves from such serious incidents, but these fictitious examples illustrate, among a thousand other possible examples, the challenge and the importance of quality in the B2B/B2G high-tech markets
Non-quality can undermine many efforts in product or service design. If innovation is an important element of customer decision and preference, quality is a fundamental element of customer satisfaction.
But what exactly are we talking about when we talk about “quality” in the technological world and try to link it to customer satisfaction?
Quality in the B2B/B2G world has at least 3 dimensions:
- Design quality: this is an “engineering” issue that impacts both the “usability” of the product, its “serviceability”, its reliability and often its manufacturing costs
- Manufacturing quality: this ensures that the product meets its specifications and performance. It is essentially an industrial problem of consistency in quality
- Service quality: this is both a question of defining the service with the associated commitments (SLA) and a question of consistency in quality, which often depends on the definition of service processes and the industrialisation of these processes. Depending on the case and the way in which the service is produced and delivered, it will refer either to the training of the men and women in charge of delivering the service or to the performance and reliability of the IT system if the services are delivered remotely in a computerised manner.
It should be noted that in several activities in the high-tech B2B world, certification and inspection bodies are responsible for certifying components or equipment to authorise them to be placed on the market, to remain in service or to check that each of them individually complies. Their intervention is compulsory in activities where a lack of conformity can present major risks. The typical case is of course air transport.
