Everything Lean

for Leaders and Their Teams

Peanut Butter and Jelly. Starsky and Hutch. Inspection and Quality?

Inspection and quality go together, right? Wrong! Conventional wisdom holds that inspection and quality go together like those other famous partnerships in the title. After all, there are mountains of books on how to create sampling plans to check quality with inspections, and nobody blinks an eye when there is an end-of-line inspection station set up. The truth, though, is that we should be looking at the need for an inspection as a giant red flag waving in the breeze.

Inspection and Quality and Red Flags

An inspection is an admission that we know about a quality problem, and haven’t tackled it. The trouble is not that the defect is getting through to the customer-inspections can be fairly effective at stopping that from happening (though they are not perfect).

The problem is that it breeds a culture in which people knowingly pass on poor quality. It sends a message that fixing quality problems is not urgent, because there is somebody else who will take responsibility for the work coming out of our work areas.

I’m not saying to require people to be mistake free. I’m saying that we should be finding ways to make processes that can’t put out bad parts (or services in the office). I’m saying that we should not become complacent about permanently linking inspection and quality in our strategies.

We should look at every inspection as a failure, whether the part turns out to be good or not. What do you think? Am I overly harsh in my view of inspections, or is eliminating the need for all inspections a worthwhile goal?

By Jeff Hajek

January 22nd, 2010

Learn about

the author,

Jeff Hajek.

Don't forget to sign up for my Gotta Go Lean Blog.

Via RSS

Free Lean Forms

Get over 20 continuous improvement forms for free!

Get FREE Lessons of the Day on Email

Other Information You May Be Interested In...

Inspection and Quality. How the NFL Can Teach You About Lean. So, it is a Sunday morning, and the outlook for today is bleak. You see, it is the bye week...
Make Quality Better: Eliminate Hammers To make quality better, you frequently have to go hunting for problems. One indicator of problems, though, is hard to...
7 Tips to Build Good (Lean) Behavior My dad lives in the Chicago area. His house has been buried in multiple snowstorms over the course of this...
Accountability in Lean For Lean leaders, both accountability and authority are obviously important. Authority is the state of having the power to give...
Supplier Criteria: Do They Apply to Internal Suppliers, too? Most well-managed companies track the performance of its suppliers. Or more specifically, they track the performance of their external suppliers....

Comments and Feedback:

Please leave feedback about this post.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Comment

Mark Welch says:

January 22, 2010 at 5:35 am

I think you are dead-on target with your thoughts on this, Jeff. I read a quote from Deming almost 20 years ago – “All inspection is waste.” So, you’re in good company. If we ask ourselves if inspection adds value, hopefully most all of us would give a resounding, “NO!” As you pointed out, though, it’s SO HARD to change this paradigm, especially in American culture. In fact, when I’ve brought this thinking to some colleagues, they won’t accept it unless some published authority espouses the same thinking. (So much for their opinion of MY credibility!) Those of us who understand the notion of built in quality (BIQ) as one of the “walls” of the Toyota House Model, with Jidoka, Andon, Poka Yoke, etc. see this as a no-brainer. Unfortunately, I think most people have to experience this concept in real life before they will accept it…

Reply