Building Quality into the Process

Preventing a wildfire is always easier than putting it down. Similarly spending a few minutes resolving an issue with a pick is far faster than spending over an hour delivering an item to San Francisco.

To understand how to build quality into our products from the very beginning, we need to understand why this is not happening naturally. The most common way of preventing defects from reaching customers is usually done by a number of inspections after the process is completed. The problem with this approach is that it is reactive and wasteful. An example of this is Rentalworks allows you to have a column on the picklist that is for someone to QC your pick...they basically would do the entire pick again and just confirm you have each item. This is an example of waste as we should focus on how to get the pick correct on the 1st attempt.

In the end, reactive quality management makes us generate more associated costs and still get plenty of defects in our products.

Built-in quality is a natural outcome of successful adoption of continuous improvement mentality and Lean principles. If we continue to fix what bugs us and resolve our mistakes through improvements, we will end up with a process that does not require anyone to check our work.

Main Ideas

• Do not accept/build/ship a defect – defects are not to be consciously created, allowed to progress through the process, or delivered to the customer. The goal is zero in-process waste.

• Defects can’t leave the station/team/person – any quality issues are resolved at the same stage of work where they are created/discovered.

• Self-organized teams proactively take action whenever it is necessary to fix an issue. If needed, someone can elevate an issue and stop the process for the sake of efficient resolution.