Our Mission

The Broken Quality Initiative is on a mission to transform manufacturing into a science and quality into a discipline. This is being achieved by building on the work of physicist Walter Shewhart—the father of the process behavior chart—and quality control expert Donald J. Wheeler. By integrating their foundational work with 21st-technologies and needs, we are steadily establishing a unified theory of manufacturing and teaching the principles that lead to world-class quality.

For too long, manufacturing and quality—both vital engines of economic growth—have been treated as sideshows, even though all engineering efforts culminate in these activities. The lack of widely accepted operational definitions and evidence-based, reproducible methods that streamline the transitions from R&D to pilot and from pilot to production have resulted in a facade of serenity that crumbles at the slightest disturbance. This does not need to continue. The challenge of producing parts, assemblies, and products that are virtually uniform is within reach. Yet consumers and industry alike continue to accept variation as an unavoidable, albeit inconvenient, part of doing business.

To move beyond this morass, we must accept the fundamental truth of the process principle: no two parts, assemblies, or products produced by the same process will ever be the same. Variation is the rule, not the exception, and it defines the context within which all manufacturing takes place.

Luckily, a process- and industry-agnostic solution to this problem already exists. Created in the mid-1920s, the process behavior chart and its associated way of thinking have proven a venerable pair for understanding variation. The challenge we face is not with the utility of the tool or the power of way of thinking, but rather with its limited use. This is the role The Broken Quality Initiative fills in pursuit of our mission: transforming manufacturing into a science and quality into a discipline. We are updating the theory and practice of understanding variation to meet the needs of modern manufacturing.