After seeing some of his tapes (which are produced by Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Spectrum ordered the entire package: 14 tapes, running some 16 hours, and costing $15,000. The company's top management endured the tapes at its monthly staff meetings, finding them provocative but ultimately disappointing. "It's simply Deming standing in front of a chalkboard, talking," says Venable. Spectrum was familiar with statistical control, had set up manufacturing systems compatible with it, and even practiced it "in a half-assed sort of way," but Deming's approach seemed somehow misdirected. "He says, 'Get your four statistics," says Venable. "Well, hey, we don't have any. And he's so profound that he becomes obscure; he'll say something like, 'Discuss third-order regression analysis. . . .' You just try telling that to some guy out on the shop floor. When we were through watching the tapes," Venable concludes, "we thought, 'Great philosophy . . . but what do we do?"
Crosby, once the director of quality for ITT Corp., seemed to warrant closer inspection. In July of last year, Venable and 16 of his top people boarded Spectrum's twin-engine Beechcraft Super King Air for Winter Park, Fla., the headquarters of Philip Crosby Associates Inc. There, for the next five days, they walked, talked, slept, and ate Crosby's approach to quality.
Crosby's pitch was "managing" quality: He was less interested in the details of execution than in giving management tools to create what he called "a quality environment . . . a new quality culture." His three books -- Quality Is Free, Quality Without Tears, and The Art of Getting Your Own Sweet Way -- are cracker-barrel collections of truisms, insights, and homey examples that boil down, in the minds of many, to a single, simple notion: Why not do things right the first time?
"He charges a helluva lot for that bit of wisdom," says Venable, pointing out that Spectrum's week of instruction cost $46,000. "We used to joke that he could just print that on three-by five cards and pass them out on the street."
Essentially, Crosby suggests that precise requirements be set for every business task, and that those standards be met each and every time. If problems occur, in either performance or product, permanent solutions must be found as soon as possible; temporary fixes won't do. And companies must track the "cost of quality" -- the price of conforming to requirements, as opposed to the cost of non-conformance -- both as an incentive and as a measure of success. Crosby's strict adherence to these standards in his own company -- there are elaborate housekeeping rules, and each instructor carries lists of "daily requirements" -- has earned him the nickname, among some students, of the Quality Fascist.
At Winter Park, Venable and his team found much to be skeptical about. They disliked the evangelical tone of Crosby's Quality College, the rote presentations, and what seemed to them like a lack of manufacturing expertise among the instructors. But the team also found much that was thought-provoking, and they attempted to adapt it to their needs. "We got a couple of coolers, and about 10 cases of Beck's and Heineken," Venable remembers. "Each evening, after class, we'd settle down with flip charts and beer, and figure out what we'd learned that day -- and how we could make use of it back in Erie."
Crosby's evangelical approach paid off in at least one major way: It destroyed the shibboleth of AQLs. "I think the principal benefit," Venable says, "was that it convinced us that, given a structure, it was possible to work toward zero defects, toward error-free performance."
Armed with such convictions, and fortified with $27,000 worth of Crosby's tapes and texts, the quality converts headed home. On August 16, at a gala kickoff party, Venable posited his and his company's new creed. "We are committed to quality performance," read the statement he had written for the company. "As an organization -- and as individuals -- we will continually seek out the specific needs of those who depend on us. We will then consistently satisfy these needs by doing everything right the first time."
The event was videotaped for the benefit of future employees, and Quality Education System (QES) courses were scheduled for every employee. Leaflets, posters, and "Quality Response Process" memos proliferated like mushrooms after a heavy rain; and Crosby's catchwords -- requirements, conformance, nonconformance, prevention, error-free -- entered the vernacular. Venable's plan was to use Crosby's razzmatazz and routines to get things moving, then rely increasingly on Deming's techniques to control the process -- modifying both, whenever it seemed necessary, with approaches of Spectrum's own design.
Some of the changes came easily, such as paying closer attention to customers' schedules. In the past, the company had often shipped its components too early, and the customers simply shipped them back. The cost of such errors, says Venable, was significant, particularly in the case of overseas deliveries -- "$150 to $200 for transshipping, and $300 for paperwork." At the other end of the pipeline, Spectrum installed new order-entry checking systems, "so we've seen a tremendous improvement in our error rate there."
For the most part, though, the improvements came slowly. "Easy?" snorts one worker in the Electromagnetic Division. "It was like giving up smoking and drinking, plus going on a diet -- all at the same time." Changing the habits and attitudes of Spectrum's workers was hard enough. But a thoroughgoing approach to quality involved the company's vendors and customers as well.
There was, for example, the matter of the bushings -- small, threaded items used to connect glass-sealed filters to other devices. The bushings were manufactured by three screw-machine suppliers, inspected by Spectrum, sent to a plating vendor, and, once plated, inspected again. At that late date in the process, some 50% were rejected.
