Author: Quality should be considered a profit center

Tom Taormina makes a goodly portion of his income these days as an expert witness in product-liability cases.

But the consultant whose company, The Taormina Group, is headquartered at Virginia City gladly would give up a portion of those earnings if he could convince a couple of northern Nevada companies to look at elimination of foreseeable risks as a potential profit center.

Taormina's 11th book, "Foreseeable Risk," will be released this week by Lawyers & Judges Publishing Co. Inc., a Tucson company.

In the book, Taormina suggests that lawyers involved in personal injury suits should move away from dueling claims from $700-an-hour experts hired by plaintiffs and defendants and instead look more deeply into the quality-control practices of the companies that sold the product at the center of the lawsuit.

In many cases, he says, a close look at the defendant company's management practices and standards of care will clearly show whether its operations were beyond reproach or allowed an injury to occur.

For instance, he says a lack of documentation about manufacturing processes often paints a picture of a company that's lax in its quality standards. A similar picture arises from a company that can't produce training or inspection records.

Some corporate failures result from managements that are ignorant of the need for quality control or abdicate their responsibilities. Others, however, willfully choose to ignore the dangers posed by poor-quality products.

Whatever the cause, he said examination of management practices often can lead to quick settlements that avoid the pain and expense of litigation.

In fact, Taormina has a registered trademark for "Forensic Business Pathology," the name he's given to the process of evaluating the integrity of a company's management, quality control and manufacturing processes.

His earlier books, which were published by Prentice Hall and ABS Government Institutes, focused primarily on the ISO 9000 and ISO 9001 quality-improvement processes.

Taormina has been teaching quality-management for the better part of three decades after he worked 14 years for NASA's mission control team. He was part of the recovery team that brought the astronauts of Apollo 13 home and heard the words, "Houston, we have a problem," first-hand.

One of his workshops these days is entitled, "It Was Rocket Science."

For all the attention he's been paying to the development of a strategy to identify successful and failed corporate quality programs, Taormina says he'd vastly prefer to work with companies as they develop programs to reduced errors.

He suggests, in fact, that companies accustomed to accounting for quality control as a cost instead look at good quality as potential driver of higher profits.

It wasn't that long ago, he notes, that the odometer in most American-made cars had space for only five digits.

But higher-quality manufacturing graphically demonstrated in the odometers that now routinely show six digits has helped automakers claw their way back into world markets.