Feigenbaum defined the term as an effective system for integrating the quality development, quality maintenance, and quality improvement efforts of the various groups in an organization so as to enable production and service at the most economical levels which allow full customer satisfaction.

You are a newspaper publisher. you are in the middle of a one-year rental contract for your factory that requires you to pay $500,000 per month, and you have contractual labor obligations of $1 million per month that you can't get out of. you also have a marginal printing cost of $.25 per paper as well as a marginal delivery cost of $.10 per paper. if sales fall by 20 percent from 1 million papers per month to 800,000 papers per month, what happens to the afc per paper?