zed certification

Courtesy: zed certification

Management commissioned a team to examine the phenomenon and come up with an action plan, which became the organizing, motivating, and initiating elements of Zero Defects.^: 15 The Department of Defense also took notice and in 1964, began to actively encourage its vendors to adopt Zero Defects programs. Interest in the program from outside firms, including Litton Industries, Thiokol, Westinghouse, and Bendix Corporation,¹⁶ was keen and many made visits to Martin to learn about it. Their feedback was incorporated and rounded out the program. In particular, General Electric suggested that error cause removal be included in the program.¹⁶

Martin claimed a 54% defect reduction in defects in hardware under government audit during the first two years of the program. General Electric reported a $2 million reduction in rework and scrap costs, RCA reported 75% of its departments in one division were achieving Zero Defects, and Sperry Corporation reported a 54% defect reduction over a single year.

During its heyday, it was adopted by General Electric, ITT Corporation, Montgomery Ward, the United States Army among other organizations.

While Zero Defects began in the aerospace and defense industry, thirty years later it was regenerated in the automotive world. During the 1990s, large companies in the automotive industry cut costs by reducing their quality inspection processes and demanding that their suppliers dramatically improve the quality of their supplies.

In 1979, Crosby penned Quality Is Free: The Art of Making Quality Certain which preserved the idea of Zero Defects in a Quality Management Maturity Grid, in a 14-step quality improvement program, and in the concept of the “Absolutes of Quality Management”. The quality improvement program incorporated ideas developed or popularized by others (for example, cost of quality (step 4), employee education (step 8), and quality councils (step 13)) with the core motivation techniques of booklets, films, posters, speeches, and the “ZD Day” centerpiece.

Absolutes of Quality Management

According to Crosby, there are four Absolutes:

1. “The definition of quality is conformance to requirements”

Newcomers to manufacturing bring their own vague impressions of what quality involves. But in order to tackle quality-related problems, there must be widespread agreement on the specifics of what quality means for a particular product. Customer needs and expectations must be reduced to measurable quantities like length, or smoothness, or roundness and a standard must be specified for each. These become the requirements for a product and the organization must inspect, or measure what comes out of the production process against those standards to determine whether the product conforms to those requirements or not.^: An important implication of this is that if management does not specify these requirements workers invent their own which may not align with what management would have intended had they provided explicit requirements to begin with.^: 78 0

2. “The system of quality is prevention”

Companies typically focus on inspection to ensure that defective product doesn’t reach the customer. But this is both costly and still lets nonconformances through. Prevention, in the form of “pledging ourselves to make a constant conscious effort to do our jobs right the first time”, is the only way to guarantee zero defects. Beyond that, examining the production process for steps where defects can occur and mistake proofing them contributes to defect-free production.