To help sell products, businesses will try to add or show that their product is good quality.
A good quality product will meet the customer’s expectations, therefore it must be able to complete the task that the customer is purchasing it for, it must also do what it claims it can do, for example if a water proof jacket is not water proof, it is not very good quality because it doesn’t do what it claims it can do. Quality is largely defined by the customer, a product that is good quality for one customer may not be good quality for another customer, for example a simple bike might be good for one customer because it gets them from one place to another but it might not be good for another customer because this customer wants to be able to reach high speeds on their bike which this bike cannot do therefore it is not good quality to this customer because it cannot meet their expectations. Adding quality also helps sell products because it gives a USP (unique selling point) which makes the product different or better than the competitors products. PEP includes in their mission statement “ produce the best electrical appliances” this statement shows how important it is for PEP to produce high quality products, to do this PEP will need to add as much value and quality to their products as possible. To help sell products businesses will also add value to a product, they will do this by adding to stages to the production process.
For example PEP could do this by selling a television instead of selling the parts separately, below are examples of how PEP would add value to this product: The design of the product also helps the business to add value to its product, this is because a customer may be more tempted to purchase the product rather than the competitors product if it looks nice and therefore this creates a USP. If a customer purchases a product rather than the competitors’ product because of its design then the product has met the expectations by having a desirable design. Another method used to add value is either charge a premium price and make the customer think that it is a good product through successful marketing, or they could reduce the production costs by making it run more efficiently and then pass on the savings to the customer who will purchase the product because it is cheap. Adding value to a product helps PEP to add quality to their product because when they get raw materials (inputs) and change them to a finished product (outputs) they are meeting the customers needs ( which is part of what quality is about) by providing them with a product that they need or would like to purchase. Another way how quality and adding value can help sell products is if products are checked for quality and quality is added during every production stage, this gives the business for providing high quality products which allows them to add value to their product.
By adding quality to PEP’s product, PEP will produce products that are of high quality, this will give PEP a good reputation for having good quality products which helps PEP add value to their products, this is because it gives the customer another reason to purchase PEP’s products (the reason is that they can be assured that the product will be of high quality)Quality control To help achieve good quality products, businesses might have a quality control systems where products are checked for any defects. This could involve checking finished products to see how good their quality is or how many defect products have been produced and it can look at whether the production method is good or not. Quality control systems help businesses add quality to their products because they can assure customers that their products are going to work. The advantage of having any quality control system is that the end result should be that less defect products go to be sold to the customer, who will be annoyed if he/she purchases products which do not work how they should do. The disadvantage of all quality control systems is that defective products may still pass the quality control system because of human error, some employees might accidentally not check some products which could be defective products.
Peps quality control system is quite good because samples of products are checked for any defective products, if there are too many defective products in one sample, the whole batch will be thrown away, this way they can be almost certain that their finished products will be of a satisfactory standard, the disadvantage of this I that the samples chosen can give a biased idea of whether the products are good quality or not. For example if all the products chosen for the sample are poor quality products but the rest are good quality products, the whole batch will be thrown away because the sample chosen weren’t good quality, this wastes PEP’s time because they are having to produce products again and it wastes PEP’s money because they have to spend money on getting the new raw materials for the products that shall have to be made again. As well as checking finished products, PEP also check the quality of the materials that shall make the product, this way thy can isolate the problem before the product is made (if the problem is in the materials). These methods for checking products for quality help PEP to add quality to their products and give them a good reputation for having high quality products. When Keith Parker came to PEP he introduced quality circles to help prevent defect products.
This will involve regular voluntary meeting between workers and managers (usually 5 to 15 people are involved), they will discuss how well the business is doing in preventing defects and adding quality to their products, they will also discuss how they can improve the quality of their products and how they can decrease the amount of defective products.
