Sounds good, doesn’t it? 99.9% conforming product delivered. Except that in certain large organisations that miserable missing 0 .1% could equate to 16,000 pieces of lost mail a day, 22,000 wrongly debited/credited cheques per hour, 20,000 incorrect drug prescriptions per year and 12 new-born babies given to the wrong parents every day in the USA. Ian McMurray, Group Quality Director, explains how Meggitt is going to close the gap.

Meggitt is several points away from the 100% quality product average customers are demanding in an era of unprecedented new programme launches—and wins for Meggitt. However, Corrective Action Preventive Action (CAPA), effectively a “Quality Clinic” starter programme, is going to help get us there.

CAPA provides the tools to contain and make decisions on how to address defective product through scrap, rework or customer concessions, underpinned by the requirement to prevent the error—or errors—from creating that defect again. With a mix of basic, structured and advanced problem-solving tools such as the 5 Whys, Cause & Effect, Seven Step and Six Sigma, the institution of Quality Clinics marks the start of a reinvigoration of Quality processes as part of the Meggitt Production System implementation.

Over the next 18 months, every Meggitt business will be exposed to the philosophy of CAPA within two-day introductory courses designed to appeal to the novice and seasoned continuous improvement practitioner, line manager and cell operative in equal measure.

Ian McMurray, Group Quality Director, says: “You’ve heard it before but it doesn’t it make it any less true. Quality is everyone’s responsibility.” He cites recent weld problems where reworking a product was confused with corrective action. “Actually, the fundamental issues were nothing to do with welding. It was about lighting, training and equipment, requiring a multi-functional response from operations, HR and procurement.” However, McMurray also makes clear: “Quality has to be regarded as much of a personal responsibility as a team effort. The person down the line is your customer, to whom only good things should be passed.”

So, why CAPA now? As a maturing organisation, Meggitt is in a position to implement the standard processes that enable big levers for change to be identified and continuous improvement techniques applied. CAPA is, of course, just one of many quality processes (Prevention of Counterfeit and Fraudulent Parts, Works Transfer Management, Production Part Approval among them) but CAPA is to Quality what 6S is to a Continuous Improvement function like MPS.

Speaking of MPS, McMurray knows that Quality activity must complement Meggitt’s big Lean and continuous improvement initiative. However, he sees the danger of duplication as a relatively short-term risk. Daily Layered Accountability (the multi-layered daily review process that sees problems rise to the fore in a capillary action to the appropriate decision-makers) will mature. Quality processes too. At this point, McMurray expects operators to be conducting most dispositions at cell level. However, he knows that disposition data will always be needed for trend analysis and the application of holistic corrective action to policies, systems and processes. This points to the requirement, over the long term, for virtual Quality clinics.

With the launch of the CAPA programme, Meggitt personnel will be exposed progressively to Meggitt’s new Quality mark—a combination of the letter Q and a stylised magnifying glass allied to the slogan: “Right First Time Every Time”. This is the Quality professional’s nirvana, arising from a mind-set that aspires to zero defects. “Of course, to err is human,” says McMurray, “so the emphasis must be on error-proofing as much as we can, so our systems tell us that a defect is likely to arise, rather than customers telling us it already has.” ‘BIQ’—Built-in Quality—is where McMurray and his team of regional and divisional directors—is headed.

McMurray concludes: “Ultimately, we want to raise awareness, so that our people can recognise failure modes instinctively. It is about learning to stand back and really look so you can ask yourself why a document containing instructions is so clean [not much referred to], why valuable components are placed on unsuitable surfaces [causing unnecessary damage]; why components are positioned where they are [not ergonomically] and why almost identical product sits side by side [risking confusion].”

McMurray will measure the effectiveness of the CAPA training not only by how rapidly defective product is contained and dispositioned but by the number of error-proofing solutions that arise from the application of structured problem-solving tools and techniques. “That’s when quality becomes built-in and you get robust, repeatable, manufacturing processes that employees and customers can really rely on.”