What About Quality?

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Has the requirement for quality really changed in the last 1000 years? As you might guess I suspect not. The cobbler from the last Mini Lesson would loose their life, literally, if the quality of the product did not meet the standards of the “King.”

So what is happening? Why do the so called business gurus say quality is now important?

The change is in the perception of quality and who is responsible. In the story of the cobbler. The cobbler was responsible for the production of shoes. They were also responsible for the quality of the product. They were crafts persons who discussed the requirements of the product directly with the customer.

When mass production became prevalent the job of talking to the customer was relegated to the marketing department or sales department or what ever name you want to give to the group who is responsible for sales. The person making the item for sale did not have any contact with the customer.

Even worse, the person making the product was not told which of the conditions of the process were important to the customer. The customer was invisible to the production worker.

An invisible customer is not all bad. After all the business was talking to the customer. The business was meeting the needs of the customer. In fact, the needs of the customer was being met in a way never before imagined. New products were being delivered to the customer daily. New colors were being invented. More of the same item was being produced than ever before to meet the needs of the mass market. In other words the customer requirements were being met, to a point.

What went wrong with the system was sky rocketing costs. Mass production without thought to the quality of the product at each step lead to high debug costs for the producer and high ownership costs for the customer.

When Ford and others started the concept of mass production they did not understand the need for quality at each step. After all they were producing more product than had ever been possible before. The idea that quality affected the bottom line was not proposed as the demand for product was so high and the cost so low as com paired to crafts person made products that the need to implement quality control at each process step was not required.

As competition grew profit margins shrank. Something had to be done to bring profit back into line. Quality departments were setup. Remember, the business was still talking to the customer but the production personnel were not in the loop. Looking back, hindsight is 20/20, a quality department was not the way to improve quality for the customer.

The Quality Department at first did not talk directly to the customer or the line personnel.

Manufacturing always fights with the Quality Department because they have different views of the customer needs. With Juran and Demming setting up camp in Japan to teach production control techniques companies like Toyota could see the problem with having a separate Quality Department. They instituted what is now considered “Lean Manufacturing.”

From a quality point of view with Lean Production Techniques the customer is no longer invisible to the production line worker. Quality becomes everyone’s responsibility. In this way the manufacturing personnel are no longer fighting the Quality Department because they are now the Quality Department.

Lean Manufacturing brings the production environment back to the same footing as the cobbler customer interaction of 1000 years ago.

NOTE: If a company needs a person to constantly monitor the Lean Manufacturing Process to see that it is being continually used, the company has not implemented the proper processes for continual success. The “Lean” philosophy must be written into the standard process specifications so there is continual improvement with constantly reducing Muda.