You Get The Quality You Pay For

Once you’ve established that you want to purchase a good or service you’ll invariably look at the various features available that are offered and the price. As part of the price consideration you’ll also check the quality that you’ll receive in return. The rationale being that you pay for what we get. This is something that many of us have learned the hard way when we’re younger and don’t listen to our parents’ advice.  

The quality of a good or service is often a critical part of it, and it determines how effectively it can deliver what its designed to do. For low value items this may not be particularly important, however for more expensive items this is usually key as quality issues can have potentially costly consequences.

The quality is reflected in the price

The level of quality will vary depending on the price paid for it. It’s important to remember that the supplier of a good or service is in business to make money to pay their own costs and ultimately to make a profit and therefore they price accordingly.

Paying too low a price may sometimes come at the expense of getting the level of quality expected. A supplier is naturally inclined to want to want support and grow a client that is not going to put them out of business!

Consequences of poor quality

Lack of quality sometimes results in more problems for both the purchaser and the supplier as both will want to resolve any issues that arise as a consequence. These consequences may have both financial and time costs that may be passed on to your own clients, which could potentially damage your own business’ reputation.

It’s rare for everything to be always perfect and issues do sometimes arise and its then that suppliers can come into their own as to how they deal with these issues. Some suppliers will go above and beyond to right any issues and others will just try to ignore them.

The overall quality that is delivered from a good or service may sometimes be beyond the control of the supplier as parts of it may be outsourced to a third party, for example, delivery. However, its important that the supplier takes responsibility for controlling the quality of their own suppliers.

Conclusion

The quality of any good or service is a key component of any purchase as it has a considerable impact on the results driven from using it. Getting the right quality is crucial as getting it wrong can lead to costly consequences. As well as quality, it is important to remember that you may want to think about other considerations that help to deliver real value to you based on what’s really important to you and your company to get the best out of your suppliers.

To learn more about how you can put your company’s core values at the heart of all your sourcing, contract and supplier management activities go to oboloo.com. oboloo enables you to be supplier smart.