Your business needs
Customers require products and services with certain specifications to suit their needs. The ability to meet all those requirements is called product or service quality. It always starts by asking your customers what constitutes added value for them, and what they are actually willing to pay. We call these value-added customer requirements CTQ´s -Critical To Quality-. Once the CTQ´s are fully understood, they are translated into measurable product characteristics, and tolerances are set for each of them. If you do not have such an outside view of what your customers actually demand from your organisation, then there is a gap between what you offer and what they demand — and consequently, wasted business opportunities.
Sometimes this translation is performed properly, but the problem lies in the amount of defects generated, resulting in higher CONQ´s -Cost Of No Quality-. A well-structured program aimed at discovering cause-and-effect relationships, or root cause analysis, is needed in this case.