Left right, left right, wrong!

Application of the outputs from new technologies, particularly revolutionary new materials, is changing the concept of “total quality”. As a result there will be new dimensions to customer satisfaction in the twenty‐first century, and providers of goods and services need new management practices to meet these changing requirements. Most of the popular management models for process and product improvement, and their depiction of supplier/producer/user linkages, are now inadequate. They imply simple linear progression of ideas, information and product (from left to right in their diagrams), whereas, in reality, routings are more complex, with continual feedback and feed‐forward. Better models are available, and some of them are described here.