Zero Defects

Business program aiming to ensure no defects in quality

the quality management program

Zero Defects (or ZD) was a management led program to eliminate defects in industrial production that enjoyed brief popularity in American industry from 1964 to the early 1970s. Quality expert Philip Crosby later incorporated it into his "Absolutes of Quality Management" and it enjoyed a renaissance in the American automobile industry—as a performance goal more than as a program—in the 1990s. Although applicable to any type of enterprise, it has been primarily adopted within supply chains wherever large volumes of components are being purchased (common items such as nuts and bolts are good examples).

"[ ] Zero Defects is a management tool aimed at the reduction of defects through prevention. It is directed at motivating people to prevent mistakes by developing a constant, conscious desire to do their job right the first time." — Zero Defects: A New Dimension in Quality Assurance

Zero Defects seeks to directly reverse the attitude that the number of mistakes a worker makes doesn't matter since inspectors will catch them before they reach the customer. though at least one contemporary reference credits a small, unnamed group of Martin employees. Zero Defects was not the first application of motivational techniques to production: during World War II, the War Department's "E for Excellence" program sought to boost production and minimize waste. The Cold War resulted in increased spending on the development of defense technology in the 1950s and 1960s. Because of the safety critical nature of such technology, particularly weapons systems, the government and defense firms came to employ hundreds of thousands of people in inspection and monitoring of highly complex products assembled from hundreds of thousands of individual parts. Interest in the program from outside firms, including Litton Industries, Thiokol, Westinghouse, and Bendix Corporation,

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.

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.

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.

Workers, at least during the post–World War II economic expansion, had a lackadaisical attitude on the whole toward work. Crosby saw statistical quality control and the MIL Q 9858 standard as contributing to this through acceptable quality levels—a concept that allows a certain number of acceptable defects and reinforces the attitude that mistakes are inevitable. The point of writing Quality Is Free was to demonstrate that quality improvement efforts pay for themselves. Crosby divides quality related costs into the price of conformance and the price of nonconformance. The price of conformance includes quality related planning, inspection, and auditing; the price of nonconformance includes scrap, rework, claims against warranty, unplanned service

Point 10 of Deming's 14 points ("Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity.") is clearly aimed at ZD. Joseph M. Juran was also critical of ZD. Another criticism is that Zero Defects is a motivational program aimed at encouraging employees to do better. Crosby stated that "Motivation has nothing to do with it It is merely setting performance standards that no one can misunderstand and then starting a two way communications exercise to let everyone know about it." He blamed management actions and attitudes for creating the opportunity for defects.