Fast, Cheap & Good Beats First-To-Market

When customers allow businesses to produce low quality, high cost products and service, time-to-market rules business and all else takes the back seat. Business is currently focused on time-to-market without worry of cost or quality as the customer has no choice than to accept high cost and low quality from all suppliers, and therefore first-to-market captures the business. I believe as Businesses realize they can do better than their competitors as they increase the quality of their products and reduce the cost, that things will change, as this will benefit the customers more than them just being the first to get the next generation product or service that is also the first to break or otherwise fail them or not meet their needs or expectations resulting in dissatisfaction. First to deliver would mean very little when the competitors next day product is cheaper and better. Competition is what is needed to solve the problem. The first business to change will change what the competition is based on. You don’t need to be first-to-market if the offering is also good and cheap, as fast to market will be good enough and good and cheap will dictate as it should. The businesses that do not change will lose their business. Everyone assumes cheap and good takes longer as that is a rule of life: fast, cheap, good, pick any two. Many consider being cheap and good means last-to-market. Fast, cheap and good is possible and the trick to it is improving quality, the thing that most people believe is what slows things down. Quality slows things down when it is applied in the reactionary form of inspection. It actually speeds things up when it is CORRECTLY applied as in the proactive form of assurance. When quality is assured by building it into the design and the business, it will speed it up. Many companies apply QA as an inspection of the design, effectively making QA reactive instead of proactive, and that slows things down. Applying QA correctly by building it into the business practices is the answer and anyone that has successfully done it knows this to be truth and not fiction.