Behind Your Business

My daughter returned to college in New York this fall. During the summer she kept many of her belongings in an off-campus storage facility. Everything was secured with a new "Made in China to U.S. quality specifications" lock from a well-known U.S. company.

When we went to retrieve her stuff at the beginning of the semester, the lock wouldn't open. Though we couldn't detect anything wrong with it, we were afraid she might have accidentally bent the key. So we tried the key on another lock nearby manufactured by the same company, just to see if the key was bent. Surprisingly, not only did my daughter's key fit, it opened the other lock, giving us access to somebody else's stash. We immediately closed the other lock, since it wasn't ours, and left to deal with our problem.

Fifty dollars later, with newly purchased bolt cutters in hand, we liberated my daughter's belongings.

I later called the lock company's customer help line and was told they had received other such complaints about this same model of lock. They offered an apology and a brand-new lock of the same model. I accepted the apology but turned down the replacement. When we need another lock, we'll get it from another company.

Quality Matters

There is a simple lesson here: Quality matters, even when you're talking about a simple, everyday keyed lock costing just a few dollars.

Many companies have successfully outsourced production to China, achieving cost savings of 30 percent or more and quality standards equal to or even exceeding their U.S. production. These successes have not always come easy. They often have involved significant investments in quality control -- building quality into the entire production system, from design to manufacture, assembly, and inspection.

Some companies have focused excessively on cost savings, shortchanging quality. And as sure as Monday follows...