Here's a riddle. If you're a customer, you'll instinctively know when you've received it and if you’re a supplier, you'll probably think you know when you've delivered it. What is it? It's Quality, that much sought after attribute that some organisations say is in their DNA and others wish they'd thought of that first.
Leaving Deoxyribonucleic Acid aside, there are many definitions around for quality, but I believe the simplest and most useful is that it's whatever the customer thinks it is. When you or your organisation supplies a product or service, the transaction is not one way. It's a closed loop, with the customer receiving what you deliver and providing feedback on what they thought about it, either via a direct response, a survey or return business. That feedback then provides an input to you to improve your quality. It's not about being perfect but rather about understanding and matching your customer's wants and needs.
A simple but useful model was created for this, by Dr. Noriaki Kano (known as the Kano Model, as you might expect). It's often associated with new product or service design but it can be equally useful for quality improvement. It seeks to define levels of customer satisfaction, from basic through to "excitement", in terms of various features. Once you know what your customers value, you can then go about delivering it. Think of it like a key and lock. The key is what you deliver and the lock is what your customer wants. When the two match quality is maximised. So go ahead and be a locksmith.
You may then need to translate desired features into your internal process KPIs and another useful tool for this is known as Critical to Quality (CTQ), which helps to define exactly how you will deliver those features in terms of your internal processes. See the Design section on this site for some examples.
And lastly, you need to maintain the level of quality that you have taken so much trouble to define. This will invariably involve collecting analysing and displaying data and for this, a bit of Statistical Process Control (SPC) software is going to do the job. It will allow you to monitor your processes far more effectively than basic spreadsheet software. See the Analyse and Glossary sections on the this site for some examples.