With this thesis at the forefront the authors spend the rest of their presentation on informing the reader how internal process improvements can be linked directly to the external customer. According to the authors most quality improvement programs are set up as market and customer driven, as well as customer oriented. However, failure of these quality improvement programs rests in a program's inadequacy to be customer oriented and more focused on a market driven orientation. The authors further their argument of quality improvement program failure by alerting the reader that failure is highly impacted by the omission of marketing personnel in the development of the program itself. According to the authors most quality improvement programs rest entirely upon the knowledge and input of quality control engineers, manufacturing individuals, operation managers and human resource personnel - all without the input of marketing sophisticates. The authors end their statement of quality improvement process failure by asking the question "Why are marketing people not more involved in quality improvement?"

Once the above question is presented by the authors, the reader is led to believe that a presentation will be made with respect to marketing's impact on quality improvement process programs. What follows, however, is a lengthy, and almost personal, discourse on customer oriented quality improvement programming...

In fact from page 84 through 87 the word "marketing" fails to appear. The presentation becomes simply one of restating the basic intent of all quality improvement process programs, namely, issue, resources, data collection, and actions to be taken. Knowing that customer input is an exciting manner in which to get everyone involved in a quality improvement program should have been the focal point of the authors' written presentation.
For anyone reading the selected publication authored by Kordupleski., Rust, and Zahorik the following evaluative comments should be kept in mind:

The article can best be described as a well written personal expose on the topic of why quality improvement process programs fail. The presentation is not empirical, descriptive or historical in design. Further, the presentation cannot be classified as qualitative or qualitative.

The presentation lacks a great deal of substantive research support (primary or secondary) and, as such, should not be used as a primary source of information.

The presentation fails to include in a discussion of quality process improvement programming the concepts of the client's business strategies, legal needs and service expectations. In addition, more emphasis might well have been placed on voice of the customer research or customer focus.

Critique: Quality Programs