QUALITY AND RELIABILITY ENGINEERING INTERNATIONAL

Qual. Reliab. Engng. Int. 2002; 18: iii

EDITORIAL

MIND THE GAP

Travellers on the London Underground will at stationswith strongly curved platforms hear the loudspeakerwarning ‘mind the gap’ before entering or leavingthe train. It is a warning that I feel that quality andreliability practitioners should heed in another sense:events of the past few years have demonstrated all tooclearly that there is a gap, ill-defined but real, betweenthe hype surrounding quality programmes, standards,and awards on the one hand, and the performance ofthe product with the end-user on the other.

As an example, within the automobile industrythe Bridgestone/Firestone tyre failures on Ford four-wheel drives received much media attention. In thelight of these disasters it is no wonder that thepublic in general, together with many quality andreliability professionals, must look askance at someof the highly profiled quality programmes, includingthe IS09000, QS-9000, and even the respected SixSigma culture. Clearly, the reality of the tyre failuresoccurred in spite of the fact that the companiesinvolved were certified and heavily committed to suchquality programmes.

At a much lower level, let me relate the followingexperience. Recently, I handed in my trustworthysix-year old car for a roadworthiness check-up. To my

surprise the mechanic phoned. He asked me if I wasaware that the brake discs on the near-side and off-side front wheels were of a different diameter! Whenchatting with the mechanic at a later date he told methat it was not unusual to find that some cars straightoff the production line were fitted with different sizebrake discs, and sometimes even with non-standardsize driving axles! I was horrified, but he assured methat this indeed was the case, and that there was onemake of car in particular that was well-known in thetrade for exhibiting such defects.

Well, the story is not ‘statistically significant’, butit left me with the uncomfortable feeling that we stillhave a long way to go in the quality world to bridgethe gap between ‘quality programmes’ and the qualityof the end product. It also underlines what I believemust still be one of the weakest links in the qualityworld, namely realistic feedback from the end-user tothe manufacturer. I do not in any way propose to havea solution to this kind of weakness, but if we can atleast recognize and prioritize field failure feedback asa truly significant ingredient of quality we might startgetting some real improvements.

FINN JENSEN

Copyright 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.