Whether you’re training employees, tracking defects, or conducting audits, a good quality management system should make life easier.

If you ever get a chance to watch an aircraft being built, take it. Walking through the aircraft hangar at Northrop Grumman’s Palmdale, CA, facility, you will see two unmanned aircraft, each with a 130-foot wingspan, parked behind yellow tape. The scale of the aircraft and the desert setting make it feel like a movie set.

If you subscribe to Quality, it seems safe to assume that quality is a priority for you. But even when it is a priority, achieving high levels of quality is an ongoing challenge that requires effort from every member of the organization every day.

The issue of implementing a lasting, meaningful quality transition is so important that I wanted to continue this discussion from last month.

Quality doesn’t just happen. It doesn’t come as a result of just the corner office, but of countless people in the organization. Achievement of a robust quality culture is an outcome of the combined efforts of the minds and hearts of everyone working together toward a common cause.

They are two distinct phrases with two different meanings. But does your organization treat them that way?

Certainly, quality professionals play an important role in their organization’s pursuit of improvement and customer satisfaction. However, managers must ‘walk the talk’ in pursuit of customer satisfaction.

Increasingly complex customer and regulatory compliance requirements, tighter time-to-market schedules from customers who want greater product customization, and the constant pressure on costs and pricing make aerospace manufacturing one of the most challenging businesses in the world to compete in.

For process manufacturing companies, it is a constant challenge to meet their customer’s product quality specifications, while operating as lean as possible. 

Much of society has been taught to believe that failure is negative and results in the loss of much effort and resources. This is only true if we allow this thinking to become reality.