Day: January 15, 2010

The Quality Paradigm

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The Quality paradigm has emerged as a significant competitor to the Financial paradigm.  The Financial paradigm says that organizational results are best delivered through the sum of individual rational decisions focused on incremental costs and benefits.  The Quality paradigm agrees that costs and benefits matter, but focuses on the underlying process as the primary driver of minimizing inputs (costs) to produce a given output (benefits).  The Quality paradigm has evolved from the “scientific management” studies of “time and motion”.  It has a process engineering focus, aiming to optimize the relationship between inputs and outputs.  Improvements are inherently valuable, without tallying financial valuations.

The Quality paradigm made progress because its effectiveness in Japanese manufacturing became apparent by the 1970’s.  It also gained favor because Western organizations, relying on the financial decision-making tools, were clearly not delivering optimal results. 

The Quality advocates made five major criticisms of the existing practices.   The practices greatly underestimated the total cost of poor quality at 1-2%, while the total costs ranged from 5-10%.  The financial approach often created a cost reduction mindset when greater opportunities existed for improved revenues and margins through quality products and customer service.   The marginal approach overlooked less material cost reduction opportunities that were very significant in the long-run.  It optimized individual functions, while ignoring connection costs.  It underutilized the assets of workers who could make improvements.  While some of criticisms were misplaced or exaggerated, the Quality Paradigm presented a compelling story that lead to changes.  The new, process-based approach was delivering value that the old approach had missed.

The Quality paradigm delivered several insights that could be repeatedly applied to reduce costs, reduce defects, increase volumes, increase timeliness and better meet customer needs.  First, a controlled system inherently reduces errors and risks and leads to improvements.  Second, examining a whole process in terms of well-defined desired outputs focuses staff on the greatest improvement opportunities.  Third, the key to understanding process failures is through understanding the drivers of variability.  Fourth, variability naturally accumulates through a process, leading to greater defects and costs.  Fifth, inventory of time and goods hides current performance and improvement opportunities.  Sixth, there is no practical limit to the improvements possible in reducing variation, reducing defects or improving input/output ratios.  Seventh, a quantum leap process break-through is usually possible.  Eighth, in the long-run quality improvements usually have a net benefit, rather than a net cost.

In the last two decades the Quality paradigm has come to complement the Financial paradigm, leading to a balanced scorecard approach to strategic planning with both financial and operations measures in the performance dashboard.  Finance continues to emphasize costs and benefits while Quality focuses on the underlying processes.  This combination approach is delivering more valuable results for most firms today.

The Financial Paradigm

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The financial decision-making paradigm was developed in the 19th century by the “marginal” school of economics and refined into modern financial tools by the 1950’s.  In essence, it says that by comparing incremental benefits with incremental costs, that rational decisions can and should be made.  While academic economists refined the exact conditions under which this is logically true, practical business professionals have simply just adopted these tools.  Business students learned to choose the greatest net benefits.  Some also learned to calculate the risk-adjusted, interest-rate discounted incremental after-tax cash flows.

In practice, finance professionals and business decision-makers have seen limitations in the theory, but adapted it to make “rational” decisions.  If qualitative factors exist, they are ignored, translated into numbers or considered separately.  If key numbers are unknown, they are estimated, modeled or limited.  If factors are interrelated, a simulation model is run or lesser factors omitted.  Cash flows 30 years out are ignored due to their low present value.  Rules of thumb are used as simple linear relations.  The whole is defined as the sum of the parts.  The principle of diminishing marginal returns is used to eliminate inconvenient, minor or detailed items.

For short-term or long-term decisions, the standard financial decision making tools are adapted to meet most situations.  With experience and business judgment, decisions are made with a high degree of confidence using this single approach.

In addition to the common “adjustments” accepted by financial analysts in practice, there are deeper criticisms regarding the financial paradigm.  It is inconsistent with the historical, accrual cost approach required in public accounting.  Managers are unable to estimate factors, so they are constructed by analysts.  For major investments or decisions, the inherently qualitative factors may be most important.  Fully-loaded costs are used throughout most financial systems, so decisions are guided by “the numbers”. Purely financial incentive systems lead to padding, managed numbers and missed opportunities.   Focusing on financial results alone leads to neglect of the asset, operations and customer levels of the balanced scorecard.  Accounting systems are not structured to monitor key decisions, but to eventually report historical costs.  The financial decision making paradigm does not directly help managers to solve problems or serve customers, but it can create an adversarial relation between line managers and the financial staff.

The 1980’s “quality revolution” lead to a time when there was significant support for a variation on Shakespeare’s maxim: “first, let’s kill all of the accountants”.   Since then, finance and accounting professionals have fine-tuned their models, linked to the balanced scorecard framework, enhanced allocations through activity based costing, simplified ROI models, learned quality paradigms and deliver a mixed dashboard of financial and operations measures.

 The financial decision-making paradigm remains at the core of modern business decision-making because it does a good job of organizing the key factors, determining the level of detail needed to make good decisions and communicating those decisions to others in a consistent fashion.  No paradigm is perfect, but the marginal cost-benefit approach is doing very well moving through its second century.