Quality Should Be Boring

After graduating from college, my first job was as a flight controller for the Space Shuttle program, a job best described as “hours of boredom interrupted by moments of sheer terror.” Well, sort of. Keeping a crew of seven astronauts alive in a spacecraft traveling 17,500 mph at an altitude of 200 miles required constant diligence and attention. I spent a lot of hours watching screens of data in the Houston Mission Control Center, watching for indications of something changing out of the norm. A lapse of concentration or failing to notice slight changes could escalate into disaster. And when things happened, they happened fast!

What does this have to do with our production processes here on Earth? Many factories run in a constant state of fire fighting and excitement caused by variations in their processes. Uncontrolled variation leads to wild swings of quality. And even in cases where we notice changes in quality, sometimes our systems are not set up to communicate and escalate the issues in time to correct a potential problem. As a result, we spend a lot of time bracketing defects, quarantining potential nonconforming materials, sorting defects and scrap. It all adds up to wasted time, effort, and materials which affected our ability to delight our customers with 100% quality and 100% on time delivery.

One of the key principles of Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma methodologies is identifying and eliminating sources of variation. Sources of variation can be either Common Cause (left undisturbed, the system has a natural variation inherent to the process) or Special Cause (an influence that causes a disturbance in the system, upsetting the natural variation). Using the lean tools of value stream mapping and root cause analysis can root out these special causes, leaving behind systemic processes that perform in a predictable fashion.

Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer, once said “When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions.” In this sense, while it’s often necessary to do the fire-fighting activities to quickly resolve problems and keep manufacturing running, there is tremendous value is taking a higher level approach to problem solving. Creating lean systems that are stable and consistent make quality boring. That’s a goal worth achieving!