One of the greatest issues facing quality management professionals today is identifying problems and quantifying their impact on two critical metrics: profit and customer satisfaction. It wasn’t too long ago that the primary method for detecting quality problems was inspection, a time-consuming, expensive and laborious process.
Despite the extreme level of effort involved in inspecting goods throughout the production process—requiring repeated inspections from the time components hit the receiving dock until the finished goods left the shipping dock—inspection as a quality management methodology was an expensive failure because it failed to identify problems until later in the process, when the costs of remediation become much higher.