Today, the cost of quality in the manufacturing industry accounts for all the expenses incurred to improve quality. This includes prevention costs, assessment costs, and internal and external failure costs. At Scortex, we focus not only on meeting our customers' specifications but also on helping them significantly reduce their total cost of quality, while having live access to quality data on their manufacturing lines. This is why we met with Bill Black, former quality director of the ABB group and previously of Airbus, to understand the cost of quality for this multinational and the methods they have found to manage it.

How was the cost of quality measured at ABB, and was it truly quantifiable?

"At ABB, we developed an effective 'Cost of Quality' model that, although focused solely on internal failure elements, still resulted in a waste of about 10% of the cost of goods sold that could have been avoided if we could only identify and address the root causes associated. Note that scrap and rework account for only 10% of this total waste, and many other factors (excess inventory, design errors, supplier quality failures, etc.) are even more significant. These were concrete figures, and we ignored less tangible costs such as loss of customer loyalty or damage to brand value. These enormous potential savings were used to guide our quality initiatives to the benefit of our bottom line."

Can you provide an example of a 'difficult to solve' quality issue and how did you resolve it?

"A good example comes from the aerospace industry where airplanes must be inspected and accepted by the customer before delivery can take place. Sometimes, when airlines wished to delay delivery, they focused on highly subjective issues, such as minor dents or surface scratches, and used them as a reason to postpone the acceptance of the aircraft. To resolve this issue, we had to develop a way to quantify strict acceptance limits for dents and scratches, agree on these limits with all customers, and then enforce them firmly. In this case, it involved the laborious creation of a manual clearly defining the acceptability limits for dents and scratches on the entire exterior surface of the aircraft. Once agreed upon with the customer community, and then rigorously adhered to at each delivery, this became the reference for both concession payments and maximum delay periods. This is a perfect example of the old rule that if you can't measure it, you can't fix it."

To read the rest of this interview with Bill Black, here is Part II. And to delve deeper into Scortex's vision of automated quality control, you can read our interview with Hugues Poiget, CEO of Scortex.