Rachel Boyce, president of a company that manufactures electronic components, has a number of questions concerning quality and quality costs. She has heard a few things about quality and has asked you to respond to the following:

Required:

1. What does it mean to have a quality product or service? Explain how product quality and conformance are related.

2. Yesterday, my quality manager told me that we need to redefine what we mean by a defective product. He said that conforming to specifications ignores the cost of product variability and that further reduction of product variability is a veritable gold mine—just waiting to be mined. What did he mean?

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