The document discusses quality planning and control from an operations management textbook. It defines different approaches to quality, including user-based, manufacturing-based, and value-based. It also discusses quality characteristics, variables, attributes, dimensions of service quality, gaps in customer expectations and perceptions, and how improving quality can benefit a business by reducing costs and increasing sales, productivity, and profits.
So the continuum between quality being perceived as poor through to it being perceived as good is primarily a function of the nature and extent of any gaps between customers’ expectations and their perceptions. The implication of this is that in order to manage customers’ perceived quality levels, both their expectations and their perceptions must be managed.
Finally, the organization may be influencing the customers’ image of the product or service, for example through its advertising or other promotional activity, in such a way as to conflict with its actual reality. This is called gap 4.
The net effect of all these consequences is that revenues increase and costs reduce. In other words, the overall effect of raising quality levels is to increase profitability.