1. What are the similarities between internally and externally oriented definitions of quality?
2. Describe the approach that a company should use in order to understand customers' expectations.
3. List the characteristics for service quality and those for manufacturing quality. What are the commonalities and differences?
4. What assumptions about the relationship between the company standards and those of the customer are made by internally-oriented definitions of quality?
5. What are the differences and similarities among the philosophies of Deming, Juran, Crosby, and Taguchi?
6. What important organizational activities enable a firm to build quality into its products? Explain each of these.
7. Is it possible for a company to implement TQM if top management delegates responsibility to middle managers? Why or why not?
8. List the components of quality management, and briefly describe a few of the ideas, concepts, or techniques that are included in each.
9. List some customer needs associated with home theater equipment, and group these together by category. Suggest some possible engineering characteristics that could measure achievement of these attributes.
10. One quality myth is that increased quality means increased costs. Use your own personal knowledge or experiences to describe how this may not be true.
11. List the three categories of quality costs, and briefly define each.
12. Explain how the idea of quality function deployment may be applied to a service organization that is not providing a tangible good as its product.