Quality Failed Boeing, Not the Other Way Around. Here's Why.

Everyone generally agrees with the principle of building in quality rather than inspecting it. Practicing those principles is another matter entirely, but ironically, easily achievable, particularly in the Boeing example.

Boeing's Culture Problem

The quality profession has always been about risk management and mitigation. Inspection is, at its core, a risk management strategy.

Risks include:

• Overworked, under-resourced people in key roles
• Inexperienced workers
• Long periods of inactive time due to previous production stoppages that lower expertise level through lack of practice.
• Low quality of input materials
• Lack of availability of tools 
• Lack of time to complete a work task correctly
• Incomplete operations

… and a myriad of other scenarios.

After the 737 Max crashes and groundings, many Boeing lines were idle for long periods. In a risk-management culture, Boeing would have realized that lack of practice escalated the potential for errors and would have put extra safeguards in place. Instead, in response to a backlog from air carriers, Boeing ramped production back up to close the backlog.

Quality Does Not Have a Seat at the Table

In our work here at @LNS Research, we see a lack of engagement and involvement by quality leaders in efforts to transform the work of quality. In fact, we’ve found in our research that over 80% of quality transformations are led by someone outside of the quality function. These efforts are largely focused on reducing the cost of the quality function through efficiency gains. However, they rarely extend beyond the quality function itself to other functions that quality touches and could influence.

I suspect this is the case at Boeing.

One of the articles I read immediately after the door-plug issue mentioned that on production lines, workers at Boeing have digital tools—or, more properly, tools with digital communications embedded in them. The article then went on to talk about how these digitized tools are used to help manage inventory and make parts available when needed. This is an acceptable purpose and utility for digitized tools in the service of the Kanban concept.

The real missed opportunity here is the lack of understanding of digital technology's promise to allow basic “inspection” by the digital tool as the work is performed. It's not a long leap from tools that count for inventory management to tools that count for work cycle completions and quality checks, a use case very close to the door plug issue.

An effective risk framework and strategy for the Boeing situation could have included using those tools with digital communications capability that were already counting cycles for inventory management. This would allow for oversight of the completion of the cycles necessary to indicate a proper work cycle was completed on the door plug (a simple count of the number of tool cycles compared to a standard). It is a very short leap from a use case where the tool counts for inventory management purposes to a quality use case around counting the number of fasteners used in an operation.

This is only one example of missed opportunities to build quality into the process at Boeing and hundreds of other companies. It demonstrates the “art of the possible” of industrial Transformation when all the key players have a seat at the table and partner to deliver the best outcomes for the customer.

Another glaring missed opportunity that cuts across quality and risk-management culture are the design changes that resulted in the 737 Max crashes in the first place. Clearly, Boeing erred in its assessment of the risks associated with such a major design change. After the unfortunate crashes, it did not recalibrate its management culture to bring safety back to the fore and bring quality to the table earlier in the design process to build quality in rather than inspect it in.

But Who Really Cares about the Customer?

There have been many reports that have come out recently about the state of affairs in Boeing manufacturing. Several have cited manufacturing employees at Boeing who say that these kinds of quality issues have been commonplace for years. We can only assume that these employees either didn’t feel compelled to speak up or were disregarded when they did. We don’t hear about the quality employees and what they hear and see. At LNS Research, we have seen a longstanding trend that other roles care and prioritize quality experienced by the customer far more than people responsible for quality, who largely focus on compliance activities. This may have been the case at Boeing as well.

Our recent research on what it takes to be a leader in industrial operations reveals a couple of messages that are significant for the Boeing situation. Two things stand out from our research that apply:

Leaders in industrial operations have unique products and/or manufacturing processes. This was the case for Boeing before the spinoff of Spirit AeroSystems. Boeing outsourced significant portions of its defining value-creation process.

Customer-experienced quality makes a real difference. That’s right—quality is a differentiator among industrial operations leaders. Let's distinguish what we are talking about here, though. This is not quality that complies with standards; it is quality the customer can see and feel when they experience the product.

Business cases for transformation efforts often focus on cost savings. The public information about Boeing has documented well and thoroughly the replacement of the pride of engineering and safety culture with a cost management culture. The irony in the Boeing situation is that they could have had both if quality had participated in the cultural transformation and earned their seat at the table.

Quality could then influence the direction of strategic business decisions to achieve the “win-win” of a cost-conscious but engineering- and safety-focused culture through the application of digital transformation intelligence.

Industrial transformation has matured significantly over the past decade. We are now approaching a level of sophistication that, if applied holistically to add value for the customer, has the potential to realize the long-sought goal of building quality into the product and process while also achieving worker autonomy and self-inspection at reduced cost.