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A Publication of Lighthouse Consulting
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Most companies rely on some form of inspection to assure quality. It could be a person in an office whose job is to check over the work of people, see if there are any errors and perhaps add a signature to show that the work was approved or that could be in the form of an inspector at the end of the assembly line whose job it is to find defects. Unfortunately that’s not a very good way to assure quality. Let me illustrate this point. Let’s pretend that you are the final inspector in a factory that produces heart pacemakers. And let’s pretend that the following paragraph in the box represents a pacemaker. Let’s say that every letter “F” represents a fault or a defect. Your job is to find all the “F’s”. Give yourself two minutes to find all the F’s. See how many you can find. According to the United Federation of Petroleum Retailers, the files kept by most fuel purveyors lack the organization necessary to run a successful business. This surprised Fred Ferguson of Ferguson’s Fuel Depot. He felt that his files were among the best of any filling station he had ever seen. Of course, Fred knew that not all of what he had stuffed into the shoeboxes under his desk was important, but still, frequent and effective filing was the key to his bookkeeping system. Fred, quite insulted, immediately cancelled his subscription to the United Federation of Petroleum Retailer’s magazine, the Fuel Filler’s Forum, for the remainder of the fiscal year. |
If you found them all, you know there were 32. If you didn’t find them all, your pacemaker customer will drop dead. It’s very unusual to find all 32 F’s. Most people miss the F’s in the word “of.” Studies have shown that on a simple product, inspectors are only able to find 75% of the defects. Besides not being effective at finding defects, there’s another problem with relying on inspection as a means of eliminating defects and improving quality. First of all, inspection is expensive (you have to pay the wage of an inspector who adds no value to the product or service). Secondly, the inspectors are not only required to FIND the defects, they are also responsible to take the time to CATEGORIZE the defects and even to find the person to BLAME for the defect. Unfortunately while the inspector is doing all those things, whatever was CAUSING the defect is still going on and nobody is addressing that.
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Lighthouse Consulting Services |
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At
the beginning of World War II paratroopers were getting killed because
their parachutes weren’t packed properly and wouldn’t open when the
ripcord was pulled. The rate of these failures was alarming. The
general in charge did a really smart thing. He announced to the
parachute folders that every week 10% of the parachute folders would be
picked at random and be required to jump out of an airplane with a
parachute they had just packed. As you could imagine the defect rate
plummeted. 
