Achieving Quality

It’s important to understand what quality is and how to achieve it.  The definitions below will not be found in ISO 9001, but they are important to understand. 

Many companies have trouble with quality.  These companies tend to have inconsistent quality or ineffective quality systems.  One reason for this is that they do not have a clear understanding of what quality is or how to get it.  There are four absolutes of quality:

·         Definition

·         System for causing quality

·         Performance standard

·         Measurement system

To keep it simple, quality means conformance to requirements.  If you conform to requirements you do quality work, and if you don’t conform, you don’t do quality work.  There are no degrees of quality.  You either meet the requirements or you do not.  Similarly, there are no degrees of defects.  A product or service is either defective or not defective (it either meets requirements or it doesn’t).
To cause quality, companies implement inspection systems.  The problem is that quality cannot be inspected into the product.  This is not to say that inspection is unimportant, but to say that inspection need only be performed for proof of performance, or auditing.   In fact, the only way to cause quality is to design and build it into the product.  The system for causing quality then is defect prevention.

I once worked for a company that used sampling plans for critical, major and minor defects.  Respectively the acceptable quality levels (AQL) were 1%, 2.5% and 4% respectively.  If the products were running at these levels then, the company was shipping 7.5% defective product.  Performance standards like these make a statement:  Some defects are OK.  They send a message to employees that defects are allowed.

In order to produce a quality product, the only performance standard that will be successful is zero defects.  This doesn’t mean that nobody can make a mistake. Mistakes will happen.  What it does mean though is that when mistakes do happen, we work to understand the root causes, and take action to correct and eliminate them.  This sends a different message.  The message is that no defects are acceptable.  Consider the airline industry.  How many deaths from plane crashes are acceptable?

Any good company tries to measure itself to see how it is doing against goals.  It will measure sales, cost of sales, on time delivery, etc.  The measurement system for quality should be the cost of quality.  This means what it costs to do things wrong.  Some call this the price of non-conformance.  By focusing on this cost and driving to eliminate it, cost will go down as quality goes up.  When costs go down, profits increase.

For more information go to www.rosehillsystems.com.