Safety Rule No. 1: Don’t Kill the Customer
"If a builder builds a house for someone, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built falls in and kills its owner, then that builder shall be put to death.”
--Code of Hammurabi, circa 1780 B.C.E.
OK, Hammurabi is a bit harsh. But designing, building, and delivering safe products are implicit moral obligations that precede and subsume the explicit entitlement we call quality, an obligation that seems to be increasingly disregarded.
Quality 2.0 is the next generation of quality. But one must walk before one runs, and one must stand before one walks. Many manufacturers fail to recognize that many developing countries have no culture of compliance and will cut quality and safety when pressured on price.
One of my clients asked me to assess the quality maturity of its Chinese suppliers. After visiting several Chinese facilities and having a number of discussions with Chinese management, I judged that the suppliers’ quality efforts were roughly equivalent to where the industrialized world was during the early 1900s. The emphasis was on inspection and rework. After I explained to my client that this approach to quality was fraught with dangers of many kinds, my client wisely decided to pursue a two-pronged course of action. First, it would immediately establish independent quality testing and on-site supplier inspections and surveillance. Second, it would work with its suppliers to move them at an accelerated rate through the various quality innovations of the 20th century, such as statistical process control and total quality management.
The quality problems China is now experiencing are reminiscent of those experienced by Japan during the 1960s and South Korea during the 1980s. More high-profile quality problem stories can be expected as the Chinese move from manufacturing simple, low-cost products to more complicated, higher-cost items. Some Chinese argue that they’re being unfairly singled out for criticism by their overseas competitors. As reported in the Shanghai Daily by Mei Xinyu, a senior researcher with the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, “The figure recently released by Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare showed that 99.42 percent of imported foods from China were safe and up to standard, compared with the 98.69 percent of those from the United States and 99.38 percent from the European Union.” The Economist reports that Mattel had told a U.S. congressional committee that its recall of 17.4 million toys containing a small magnet that could be swallowed by children was due to a flaw in the toys’ design, rather than production flaws in China.
Still, Chinese manufacturers recognize that not all of their quality problems are mere public relations issues. A survey reported in the China Daily indicates that nearly two-thirds of Chinese suppliers plan to increase spending on quality control in the coming year. Regarding spending plans for the year, 10 percent of respondents said that they’re increasing quality control spending by more than 20 percent, 26 percent said that spending will increase by 10 to 20 percent, and 26 percent will increase it by up to 10 percent. Encouragingly, a large majority of survey respondents indicated that the increased spending would be directed toward total quality management procedures.
To be sure, first-world manufacturers have their own set of quality safety problems. A Google search reveals thousands of news stories detailing safety recalls of products made in the United States and the European Union. Most of the recalls were for design flaws rather than manufacturing defects. Compared with the effort expended in defect prevention, detection, elimination, and rework, we have done precious little on the safety front. The quality profession needs to direct much more attention to the upstream processes for ensuring safety.
One example of forward-thinking in customer safety is Toyota’s Integrated Safety Management Concept. The idea is to provide optimal driving support at every possible level of danger, from parking to an unavoidable collision, and even for post-crash emergency response situations. In theory, ISMC will not only integrate individual safety technologies and systems within the vehicle, but will also include an infrastructure-respondent system (i.e., processing road-to-vehicle information) that should be capable of integrating information obtained from vehicles other than the driver’s (i.e., vehicle-to-vehicle information). Among Toyota’s conceptual innovations is how it defines situations by the degree of accident risk, and its use of these definitions to categorize product safety improvement efforts. Many of these concepts can be borrowed and adapted to products other than automobiles. We owe it to our customers to do so.
Thomas Pyzdek is the author of The Six Sigma Handbook (McGraw-Hill, 2003), Quality Engineering Handbook (CRC Press, 2003), and The Handbook for Quality Management (Quality Publishing, 2000). He’s a consultant on process excellence. Learn more at www.pyzdek.com. Contact him at tom@pyzdek.com.
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