Chapters 11 and 12 of Virtually Perfect by Dr Michael Grieves challenges the definition of quality and brings a new metaphor to accompany the virtual side of supply chain. We discuss “quality control” failures and how redefining in the framework of a product’s lifecycle helps us understand the sources of quality failure and how to increase product value. We also explore how the efficiency of supply chains is improved by leveraging information through our “supply net”. There is a lot to unpack and apply!
Chapter 11 “Virtually Flawless”
Joe Blogs, a quality control officer, inspected a custom-made product. It was returned by the customer a few days after being delivered with a non-conformance report. The customer reported the electrical controls operated inadequately and requested an immediate change as it was holding up a project. After completing an investigation, Joe decided that more testing should have been done before the product left the workshop again to avoid this issue.
Was a lack of testing the root issue? No. We need to look systematically at the product lifecycle. The root cause of the quality control failure in this story did not happen in the workshop but earlier due to misunderstanding the customer’s perceived value. The technical salesperson who sold the product concept did not realise the perceived value of the electrical control operations to the customer. From the perspective of the customer the delivered product was poor quality because of the electrical controls. This means it was a “poor marketing” quality control failure.
Quality control needs to occur through the life cycle of a product (create, build, support, and dispose phases). This approach helps maximise customer value by ensuring the product performs as per the perceived value. To move away from thinking of quality control as something that happens during manufacturing only, Dr Greives proposes to call quality control that occurs during manufacturing “specification control”.
As part of quality control in the build phase Dr Grieves introduced the concept of “Product Specification Management”. This includes the concept of automated as-built data, where details of the individual instance or batch of instances produced are captured. Only details that add value to ensuring the quality (perceived value) of the product are collected and are added to the as-builts. During the support phase quality control is ideally making sure the product does not fail in a way that harms the customers perceived value. An economical way to achieve this is not necessarily for the product to never fail (this could make it too expensive), but identifying the failure before it occurs and doing something about.
Chapter 12 “Virtually Connected”
In this chapter Dr Grieves introduces the metaphor “supply net”, the virtual information that goes along with supply chains.
Supply chains is a common metaphor that represents products going “up the chain” until it gets to the manufacturer who develops the final product. The new metaphor “supply net” encompasses the web of information being simultaneously shared between all levels of the supply chain so that delays and wasted time is reduced. As a product moves through the supply chain, physical quality checks are often performed. If the concept introduced in Chapter 11 of “Product Specification Management” is embraced, this information could be shared in the supply net to pick up quality concerns early and reduce their impact.
Put another way, there is a typical hierarchy of part inspection confidence, which starting from the lowest level is: certification, inspection, testing then physical visibility of product. These activities are capable of being captured, by creating a digital twin of the physical inspection information, enabling the suppliers up the supply chain to virtually verify before ever receiving the product. Capitalising on this virtual information to be more efficient, Dr Grieves suggests embracing the phrase, “transmit us the virtual product and we will tell you whether or not to ship the physical product.”
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