So where is your evidence to support your view that increasing sales and profit are not valid quality objectives.
What's 'quality' about increasing profits or sales?
Whats quality about decreasing rework?
This could be achieved by changing specs, biased measuring equipment or employing staff that don't care.
Any objective whether it be reducing rework, reducing unscheduled tool downtime, increasing yield, increasing profits or increasing sales inherets the property of what we refer to as "quality".
It's really how we go about achieving our objectives that matter and this is what in my opinion turns something into a "quality measure".
I will use sales to try and illustrate my point.
How can sales be increased?
You either need to sell more widgets to your existing customers or the same/more widgets to more customers.
Having customer requirements effectively relayed to your production, engineering and design teams helps produce a product that can be sold to a potential customer.
You can invest in further training for your sales team
You can reduce the cost of the product by sourcing a better priced supplier, perhaps by outsourcing the manufacturing, improving the inventory control system, reducing in line defects etc. Lower cost for the same quality of product seems a pretty good way of improving sales.
Sales can work with marketing departments to help improve the visbility of products to customers. I have known one salesman that used to keep a list of magazines he would see in his customers offices and if he noted magazines in common between customers he would usually be able to convince marketing to put full page adverts in those publications and it certainly seemed to work for him.
Now certainly some of these things could be the begining of a slippery slope. I don't believe that taking the view that just because there are companies that adopt these objectives and are failing for numerous reasons necessarily means these objectives cannot result in improvements to the company and its customers. I am sure there are examples of companies who state these as quality objectives and are successful, well run and produce a good quality product.
I suspect to some extent what we are actually disagreeing about here more is what "level" of objective is appropriate for a quality objective. I would consider "increasing sales" to be a high level objective where as "reducing rework" would be a lower level objective, i'm trying to use the process chart concept of high and low level as a sort of analogy here, not very good but best I can currently come up with.
I believe that including an item such as "increasing sales" can help senior management, sales, finance etc. relate a bit better to the QMS. It's how the management go about things that is important. Objectives are worthless unless their is a management team that is able to lead effectivley and to that extent objectives are in theirself completely meaningless it all comes back to how we achieve the objectives.
Is there an increased risk of somebody being more willing to cut corners if these are their objectives? Probably, I've not seen any data but I would expect it to be true. But this does not invalidate the objective.
The rest of the audit is going to tell us what we need to know anyway but to raise a NC just because the company believes increase sales or profit to be a valid quality objective isn't justifiable in my opinion.
It may be a higher level objective than perhaps is normal, expected or even desirable but is it conforming? Unless anyone can provide the evidence to support that they are not valid quality objectives I have to consider it to conform to the requirments of the standard and using the likes of Ford and GM as examples does not invalidate the objectives.
