ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of product and service quality. It addresses the similarities and differences between the product and service quality. The chapter discusses the concepts of variation and the cost of quality as they relate to service. A bank’s acceptance of a deposit might seem to be a typical pure service product, but, in fact, the deposit receipt, a component of the deposit services product, is no less tangible to a customer than a sheet of steel. A process has been defined as a series of actions which repeatedly come together to transform inputs provided by a supplier into outputs received by a customer. The output is simply what is produced by the actions. The focus of a process is to generate an output given an input. The greater the ratio of that output to input, the more efficient the operation is.
