Statisticians are concerned that the business world does not regard statistical literacy, or statisticians, as important. Little progress has been made in spreading the belief in the power of statistics to the non-statistical. This problem is as strong in the context of supporting organizational and product quality improvement as it is elsewhere. We summarize the effect of Genichi Taguchi's work on industrial experimentation, as well as developments in the use of statistical process control, statistical reliability requirements and other statistical approaches to quality. The effect of developments in quality systems standards, such as BS EN ISO 9000, the European Business Excellence Award Model and the Baldrige Award, are also discussed. We argue that statisticians' attitudes to non-statisticians and the use of their discipline will have to change if statistics is to realize its potential in supporting quality improvement. Re-education is necessary not just for the non-statistician but for the statistical community as well.
Service quality is difficult to quantify as it is a function of differing customer perceptions over time, the ever changing market conditions, the measurement process and the interpretation of the data that have been gathered. The SERVQUAL questionnaire and gap analysis have been used to analyse service quality within diverse organisations over the last 30 years. The measurement instrument has been analysed, changed and criticized by numerous authors. However, as a stand-alone tool, it has remained much the same. With organisational emphasis on change in systems as well as new and innovative ways of using computer technology, SERVQUAL is more likely to become obsolete as a stand-alone tool as new ways of collecting and disseminating data become available. However, it might survive if integrated into an ever changing IT framework within a generic company structure such as e.g. the Six Sigma framework. In our paper we strive (1) to find out to what extent is SERVQUAL helpful in process improvement; and (2) to determine characteristics of methodology that would call for application of SERVQUAL for process improvement purposes.
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