What is The Broken Quality Initiative?

Quality has become an overused term of little substance. It has become a pervasive replacement for the dimensional and performance characteristics of parts and products that we have been trained to assume are synonymous with better. But better with respect to what? Better than the competition? Better than before? Better than expectations? Quality under the guise of better is subjective and inert. This leaves it vulnerable to wants and whims rather than analysis. It leaves it devoid of a definition that is part, product, process, and industry agnostic.

The Broken Quality Initiative is a response to our collective failures to establish manufacturing as a science and quality as a discipline. It is a response to the pervasive lack of knowledge of variation and the only tool capable of making sense of it: the process behavior chart (control chart). 

This lack of knowledge is reflected in the often haphazard and chaotic methods that individuals, teams, and organizations use to improve quality and reduce costs. Rather than work to understand and eliminate the sources of variation that make processes erratic and unpredictable, inordinate amounts of time and attention are dedicated to gut feelings and guesswork. While this sentiment is often accompanied by good intentions and hard work, the lack of theory to guide actions reliably digs the hole deeper. It reliably distracts and undermines organizations from producing products of world-class quality.  

Since the seminal work of the physicist Walter Shewhart at Bell Telephone Laboratories in the mid-1920s , a method and tool capable of making sense of variation has been at our fingertips. This method, Statistical Process Control (SPC), and this tool, the process behavior chart (control chart), have kept industry busy improving quality and reducing costs for more than a century. It is due time that we put Shewhart’s method and tool to work so engineers and industry alike can turn data into insights and insights into actions that reduce costs and improve quality.