Infrastructure and Quality.
All of us in our lives use Cars, TV’s, Two Wheelers, and Bykes etc for our Daily use,
We often evaluate the worthiness, performance, and its present utility and take bold decisions in replacing these regularly.
There are items like mobiles, TV’s, Computers, which get phased out by its technological obsolescence.
If you do not own a latest gadget then you are not moving with times.
No doubt these are low cost items and we take decisions in replacing these items when they are either old, outdated, or fail too often.
Take Cars, they are expensive, so one exercises caution, but even that needs replacement after a span of time.
The Cars are getting updated for its emission norms, performance, comfort level, safety features etc, so not replacing them in time would only make you lose out on trendy and useful things in life.
Let us now see what happens in industry.
The captains of industry lay down good rules about replacement of cars for Officers as this is a perquisite and needs to be done to retain good officers in an organization.
But when it comes to Machines alas the same captains either overlook or don’t understand the urgent need to upgrade the infrastructure.
I fail to understand why the managers coming out of Good management schools do not realize the importance of a Good Infrastructure.
It is only Finance, and Sales & Marketing departments, which matter to the captains as the business runs on money.
Where does the money come from, they do only by producing good quality products.
But how are we to produce good quality goods by using poor machines.
The factory and infrastructure are cost centers and therefore often neglected and managements often do not want to incur huge expenses in upgrading/replacing the machines.
Good Quality can be produced by Good and latest equipments.
If Product Quality is so vital in Keeping the Sales of the products flying high, then why managements shy away from investments.
It is sad that Organizations lose customers because of Poor quality resulting out of Poor or old machines.
As the infrastructure gets old, the repairs and maintenance costs zoom skywards, and result in poor productivity, which only adds to the cost of the product manufactured.
Also when competitors invest and buy new machines, the customers tend to leave us for other vendors, as the perception of the customer is Latest Machines would give better Quality.
Having lost our customers to our competitors, then we suddenly think of upgrading the infrastructure, which is generally too late and it is difficult to bring back lost customers.
The customers would come back only if the Rates are less than the present rates given to them by our competitors.
The result would be that we tend to earn lesser than before with increasing cost of production because of heavy investments.
Isn’t it a dilemma that we lose customers because we did not upgrade our infrastructure?
And having lost business and taking a hit on our profitability, we are now forced to invest to stay in business which only adds to our woes of under utilization of our infrastructure because of poor demand.
Lesson of the story is If we could exercise our option and mind to replace our cars, telephones and other personal possessions time to time why are we not looking at infrastructure which is the mainstay in business to assure and ensure Quality and thereby the profitability of our products.
All of us in our lives use Cars, TV’s, Two Wheelers, and Bykes etc for our Daily use,
We often evaluate the worthiness, performance, and its present utility and take bold decisions in replacing these regularly.
There are items like mobiles, TV’s, Computers, which get phased out by its technological obsolescence.
If you do not own a latest gadget then you are not moving with times.
No doubt these are low cost items and we take decisions in replacing these items when they are either old, outdated, or fail too often.
Take Cars, they are expensive, so one exercises caution, but even that needs replacement after a span of time.
The Cars are getting updated for its emission norms, performance, comfort level, safety features etc, so not replacing them in time would only make you lose out on trendy and useful things in life.
Let us now see what happens in industry.
The captains of industry lay down good rules about replacement of cars for Officers as this is a perquisite and needs to be done to retain good officers in an organization.
But when it comes to Machines alas the same captains either overlook or don’t understand the urgent need to upgrade the infrastructure.
I fail to understand why the managers coming out of Good management schools do not realize the importance of a Good Infrastructure.
It is only Finance, and Sales & Marketing departments, which matter to the captains as the business runs on money.
Where does the money come from, they do only by producing good quality products.
But how are we to produce good quality goods by using poor machines.
The factory and infrastructure are cost centers and therefore often neglected and managements often do not want to incur huge expenses in upgrading/replacing the machines.
Good Quality can be produced by Good and latest equipments.
If Product Quality is so vital in Keeping the Sales of the products flying high, then why managements shy away from investments.
It is sad that Organizations lose customers because of Poor quality resulting out of Poor or old machines.
As the infrastructure gets old, the repairs and maintenance costs zoom skywards, and result in poor productivity, which only adds to the cost of the product manufactured.
Also when competitors invest and buy new machines, the customers tend to leave us for other vendors, as the perception of the customer is Latest Machines would give better Quality.
Having lost our customers to our competitors, then we suddenly think of upgrading the infrastructure, which is generally too late and it is difficult to bring back lost customers.
The customers would come back only if the Rates are less than the present rates given to them by our competitors.
The result would be that we tend to earn lesser than before with increasing cost of production because of heavy investments.
Isn’t it a dilemma that we lose customers because we did not upgrade our infrastructure?
And having lost business and taking a hit on our profitability, we are now forced to invest to stay in business which only adds to our woes of under utilization of our infrastructure because of poor demand.
Lesson of the story is If we could exercise our option and mind to replace our cars, telephones and other personal possessions time to time why are we not looking at infrastructure which is the mainstay in business to assure and ensure Quality and thereby the profitability of our products.
