Quality Control, When and Where?

August 27, 2004 - by Robert E. Stevens, GENESIS II (The Second Beginning) E-Mail: views@aol.com

I do not know of any manufacturing company that does not perform quality control checks. To my knowledge everyone checks for quality at the point of manufacturing. How many perform quality control control checks at other points in the product's life cycle? For instance, does your company check the quality of the product at the point of sale? Is this important? I think so. Does your company check the quality of their product in the consumer's home? Is this important? I think so.

If we consider quality control as a program installed to insure that the consumer encounters our brands when they are in the intended physical form, then the check at production is only the start. It is the simplest and easiest check. It should, however, only be the start of quality control. Consider the following actual cases.

When I started with P&G in 1951, I started in the PTG Group. PTG was the Performance Testing Group in R&D Package Soap Division. Our job involved the testing of both our brands and the brands of competition. We did not acquire our brands from the plants. We sent people into the field to purchase samples of our production from actual supermarkets, not only production of our brands but also competition. The purchasers were trained to read both our production codes and the codes of competition. We requested six samples of every brand, both ours and competition. The purchases were made twice a month and sent to our lab in Cincinnati for performance as well as physical properties testing. Why in-store purchases? Consider the following cases.

In the Philippines, our sales of Camay and Safeguard were taking a beating. We had brands superior to competition but the consumers were not purchasing them. We went into the stores and found that the bars were 30 weeks old and 30 weeks in 100° F. heat is not kind to bars. The result can best be described as a slimy rock. The appropriate age of bars should be in the neighborhood of no more than four weeks. Action was taken to stop distribution, and clear the inventory.

We introduced a new liquid hand dishwashing detergent designed for tough food clean-up called Cinch. Cinch was a detergent with abrasive consistency. Controlled testing showed the brand achieved our objectives. Our test market was Seattle. Did this city turn out to be a good choice? Everything went well until we reached the cold months. Our purchased store samples showed that shipping through freezing weather resulted in product separation. Back to the drawing board. Actually we never did work out all the bugs. Cinch later emerged from P&G as a spray cleaner, a totally different product.

Quality control samples should include those collected at the time of production, at the point of purchase and even samples obtained from the home. One page is not enough space for in-store and at-home examples of quality control. I will cover some in-home examples at a later date.

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