The Aspects of Quality
It is difficult to gauge the extent to which the 80 - 20 principle
is already known in business. You can find several hundred articles
referring to the use of 80 - 20 in all kinds of businesses, all over
the world. Many successful firms and individuals swear by the use of
the 80-20 Principle.
The quality revolution which took place between 1950 and 1990 transformed
the quality and value of branded consumer goods and other manufactures.
The quality movement has been a crusade to obtain consistently higher
quality at lower cost, by the application of statistical and behavioral
techniques. The objective, now almost reached with many products, is
to obtain a zero rate of product defects. It is possible to argue that
the quality movement has been the most significant driver of higher
living standards throughout the world since 1950. The 80 - 20 Principle
was one of the key building blocks of the quality movement. It was applied
to statistical quality control. The approach is to identify the problems
causing lack of quality and to rank them from the most important—the
20 per cent of defects causing 80 per cent of quality problems—to the
least important. Once the ‘vital few’ sources of off-quality product
have been identified, effort is focused on dealing with these issues,
rather than trying to tackle all the problems at once. As the quality
movement has progressed from an emphasis on quality ‘control through
to the view that quality must be built into products in the first place,
by all operators, and to total quality management and increasingly sophisticated
use of software, the emphasis on 80 - 20 techniques has grown, so that
today almost all quality practitioners are familiar with 80 - 20. Out
of 1,000 customer complaints roughly 800 can be eliminated by correcting
only 20 per cent of the causes. The 80 - 20 Principle is also being
increasingly applied to product design and development. For example,
a review of the use that the Pentagon has made of total quality management
explains that: Decisions made early in the development process fix the
majority of life cycle costs. The 80 – 20 rule describes this outcome,
since 80 percent of the life-cycle costs are usually locked in after
only 20 percent of the development time. The impact of the quality revolution
on customer satisfaction and value, and on the competitive positions
of individual firms and indeed of whole nations, has been little noted
but is truly massive. The 80 - 20 Principle was clearly one of the ‘vital
few’ inputs to the quality revolution. But the underground influence
of the 80 - 20 Principle does not stop there. It also played a key role
in a second revolution that combined with the first to create today’s
global consumer society.
