Toilet Quality Management (TQM)

My counterpart, Kan San, CEO of Founder Japan likes to compare China companies with Japan’s over management style and product quality. One of his favorite theories is toilet sanitary.

Kan San, CEO of Founder Japan

Once at his opening speech to address the Founder Group delegates during an overseas meeting held in Tokyo back in 1998, he said, “The cleanliness of a company’s toilet reflects the company’s management quality; and the cleanliness of public toilets tell the quality culture of a nation. ”

I couldn’t agree more. But when he kept appraising Japan to the bored audience in a dinner, I jokingly brushed him off by saying, “You didn't reveal the true reason of why Japanese public toilets are so clean, from my observation Japanese seldom use toilet to pee but they do it in the alley when they drunk.” Everyone burst into laughter.

Someone told me our former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed, who had started the Look East Policy (to learn from the eastern developed countries such as Japan & South Korea rather than the western to lessen the West influence) in the eighties, always had a private agenda to put toilet a must-visit ‘destination’ in his official functions, with the quality’s prying motive. ;-)

No matter how elegant an office building is, when you have to pinch your nose to enter the toilet, you have to think twice whether you still want to continue buying their products or services. The upkeep of toilet cleanliness reviews some trueness. Whether we call it toilet, washroom, restroom, WC, lavatory, latrine, john or loo, or whatever the term is, the sanitary of a toilet reflects the image of a company, and it is also a place where you can’t stick “Restricted Area” sign to disallow visitor to enter.

Recently, we have spent some money to upgrade our very own toilets, to further impress and to provide a more pleasant environment for staff and visitors when they carry out their daily “release” and “relieve” business.

Our upgraded toilet

24-Month Product Warranty

In April, we made an announcement to give away 24 months product warranty to customers and 28 months to resellers. This move is not merely a sales strategy without the support of our product quality.

From our internal audit figure for 2008, the total cost for claimed part is just a friction of 0.3% to our total revenue. If we extended the limited warranty period to two years, it would still far lower than 1%. That’s the rationale why we happily extended the warranty period.

Moreover, we have successfully implemented the Salesforce.com CRM system to further monitor the inflow and outflow of every warranted part claimed to ensure the smoothness of the whole process. I can imagine a big smile for our customers!

In any ISO standard certification, the management guru likes to emphasize on Total Quality Management (TQM) approach. But for an outsider, where is the simplest checkpoint? Needless to say, it’s toilet. Therefore, I rephrase the TQM with the simpler Toilet Quality Management.

All in all, toilet quality tells it all. :-)

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ