Tag: zero defects

OM in the News: Dealing with Manufacturing Quality Issues

“Imagine a world in which every product that leaves a factory is flawless, every time,” writes The Wall Street Journal (March 18, 2024).  What sounds like a plant manager’s dream is the end goal of zero-defect manufacturing, a term coined by Philip Crosby (and noted in Table 6.1 on page 217). Surging recalls have cast a harsh light on the quality of American manufacturing. But some companies say a combination of technology, training and focus can eliminate errors.

At Schneider Electric, employees are encouraged to speak up about product quality, anonymously if desired.

Ford’s CEO has said the automaker must reach “a zero defect destination,” and that the company has used assembly-line AI and extensive test drives to catch problems in its trucks. Stellantis, which is similarly targeting zero defects, said more than 100 new quality standards have led to a double-digit percentage drop in auto warranty claims. Companies in industries as varied as pharmaceuticals and snack foods have also announced zero-defect goals.

More manufacturers say they are aiming for perfection as quality-control problems have mounted. In 2022, auto makers spent record amounts on warranty claims. Recalls hit a six-year high in 2023, and jumped last year among pharmaceutical and food manufacturers. Undertrained workers, the increasing complexity of products and more sprawling supply chains were contributing to quality problems.

The zero-defects philosophy took shape in the early 1960s when defense contractor Martin-Marietta sought to eliminate errors from Pershing missiles. It had relied on inspections to find problems as small as a loose valve but refocused on prevention, exhorting workers with posters and rallies to do their jobs right the first time—followed by extensive audits. Errors at Martin plunged as hundreds of employees racked up long streaks of perfection. One worker made 500,000 solder connections without a mistake, while another put together 50,000 defect-free assemblies.

While quality programs helped U.S. companies improve their products considerably in the 1980s and 1990s, the effort stalled when businesses began outsourcing much of their work to low-cost regions.

This cost of poor quality can equate to at least 10% of sales once all factors, including the time spent dealing with problems, are taken into account. Human error is a perennial cause of defects, but it can be taken out of manufacturing systems. A machine can be built so it is impossible to load a tool backward, or an adhesive dispenser designed so it shuts off when it runs dry.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. Why do we write in Chapter 6 that “quality cannot be inspected” into a product?
  2. How do “zero defects” and “six-sigma ” compare?

Good OM Reading: Quality is Free

This Thanksgiving, 2020, is unlike any in our living past. Yet we are still healthy, continue to teach (albeit differently), and have much to be grateful for. So I thought I would share with you and your students my memories of a friend and mentor, Philip Crosby, who died almost 20 years years ago. Crosby is famous for his dozen books on management and quality, starting with his classic 1979, Quality is Free, published by McGraw Hill.

Crosby guest-lectured in my MBA classes every semester for a decade and I required my students to select any of his books and write a 1-page report on how they personally benefitted from his insights. To this day, if you visit management offices of quality-conscious manufacturers worldwide, you are likely to hear the words “zero defects” and “do it right the first time,” with Crosby’s 4 absolutes of quality as their cornerstones.

Here are his words about that 1979 book: It goes back to how people think about quality. Conventionally, quality is always looked at as goodness, as gold-plating. Quality is viewed as an expense, a trade-off, something that you have to spend money on. But you can’t manage with goodness as your definition of quality. Quality is conformance to carefully thought-out requirements. So quality is free because it is already built-in. The expense of quality is nonconformance.

Crosby believed that workers are not the problem with quality–that they pretty much do what management tells them to do. He wrote: “People think that quality is some undefinable thing that you only know when you see it. Yet quality requirements are clear. They talk about vague things like delighting the customer, but you can’t tell people what that really means, so you can’t manage that way.”

His 4 absolutes are: 1. quality is conformance to requirements, not goodness.; 2. the basic aim of quality management is prevention, not appraisal; 3. that zero defects is the performance standard, not some acceptable level of defects like 6-sigma; and 4. the measurement of quality is the price of nonconformance.

Time flies by, but Crosby’s books are always worth a second read.