How is quality broken?

Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, conformance to specification (aka the “goalpost” method) has defined quality as a field and practice. Rather than aim to operate processes on-target with minimum variance, the definition of quality established by Dr. Genichi Taguchi in September 1960, quality tends focus on the relationship between a performance or quality characteristic and the specifications. An example of this is definition of quality offered by ISO 9000:2015 Clause 3.5.1. Here, quality is defined as:

the degree to which a set of inherent characteristics of an object fulfills requirements.

On its face this definition of quality seems sensible, after all no customer in their right mind will accept product that does not fulfill requirements. However, it reinforces the antiquated idea that quality is binary. It bolsters the widely held but wrong belief that the measured characteristics of parts, products, services, processes, and systems are either good or bad, conforming or non-conforming.

As a product of this binary view, the quality landscape has beeen overun with tools, techniques, methods, and fads that ignore a fundamental truth. That truth is, whether we recognize it or not, variation always asserts its influence. It is in this failure that checklists are made and root causes are indetified but quality never seems to improve.

A product of this binary view, the quality landscape has been infected with tools, techniques, methods, and fads that are too busy mopping to turn off the water. It has been reduced to efforts that attempt to improve quality and reduce costs without recognizing the influence of something more fundamental: variation. Failure to recognize variation ensures that we look in the wrong places, ask the wrong questions, and verify the wrong answers. It ensures that defects will be produced and world-class quality will never be achieved.

As a field and practice, quality is broken because it fails to recognize the reality no two parts produced by the same process will ever be the same (the process principle). It fails to integrate knowledge of variation into its efforts.

Although we will not be able to correct course overnight, it is the aim of The Broken Quality Initiative to continue the campaign to understand variation that began with the seminal work of Walter A. Shewhart in the mid-1920s. Having kept industry busy reducing costs and improving quality for over a century, the framework he created is as useful today as it was back then. Building on these efforts, it is the goal of The Broken Quality Initiative to provide engineers and industry with the knowledge and knowhow that makes reducing costs and improving the quality of manufactured products possible. It is our goal to make knowledge of variation as common as calculating the mean.