It’s really interesting for me to look back and think about how many times quality planning has come up as an afterthought. It is staggering for me to think about what could have happened if quality planning was done the proper way.

Here’s an example….one time I was involved with a new product introduction, and one of the major milestones in the quality planning protocol was for gage repeatability to be assessed and acceptable by a certain date. Sounds fine and dandy right? Well, the exercise turned into a frustrating one, as discussions turned into something like “did the gage r&r’s get done today?”, without even considering why they were being done in the first place. Moreover, people who didn’t know the first thing about what a grr was were asking the questions…..

I’ve seen this phenomenon across several industries, and it makes me wonder if up-front quality planning generally is really taken seriously at all…..