Philip Crosby's : Do It Right First Time and Zero Defects

Philip B. Crosby was an  eminent Quality Guru , born in 1926, began his quality career as a reliability engineer. He later participated in the Martin missile experience that spawned the genesis of the Zero Defect movement. He worked in Quality Management for 14 years in ITT as a Corporate Vice President and Director Quality. In 1979 he published Quality is Free , which became a bestseller. In response to the interest shown in the book, he left his organization that year to set up Philip Crosby Associates Incorporated.

Corsby published his second bestselller , Quality Without Tears, in 1974. Other books associated with his  name are 

• The Art of Getting Your Own Sweet Way
• More Things 
• The Eternally Successful Organization and Leading 
• The Art of Becoming and Executive

Do It Right First Time (DIRFT) and Zero Defect 

Corsby is very much popular for these two concepts named as Do It Right First Time and Zero Defects. Corsby defined the quality as the conformance to the requirements which the company itself has established for its products based upon the customers needs. He believes that most companies have systems that allow deviation from actual requirement. The cost that they spend on doing the wrong things right  in subsequent chances is 20% of their revenue in manufacturing companies and 35% of operating expenses for service companies. He believed that workers should not be the prime responsible for the poor quality, In fact Management set the standard of quality and workers follow them therefore the initiative comes from the top. Doing things right first time will not prevent people from making mistakes, but will encourage everyone to improve continuously. He strongly emphasized on the top- down approach, since he believes that senior management is entirely responsible for quality.  The ultimate goal is to train all the staff and give them the tools for quality improvement , to apply the basic precept of Prevention Management in every area.

Principles of ZERO DEFECTS

• Quality is conformance to requirements : Every product or service has a requirement according to the customer needs. If these requirement are achieved by the product when comes to use of the customer then this product categorize as the quality product. for example if low cost Ink pen full fill the requirement of writing without any blot and skip on the paper then it is called the quality product in comparison of the a precious gold plated pen if it will not write good and neat on the paper. Hence if a product meets the requirement of the customer then it conforms the quality of the product , no matter how costly it is.
• Defect prevention is preferable to quality inspection and correction :  It is better to prevent the defect at  its origin rather to inspect it in the process and then correct it. It saves lot of  human power and cost of inspection and correction. For example If a person changes the poor condition  brake shoes of his bike before next riding then it will prevent lot of energy of the rider and reduce the risk of accident on the road and generation of new defect in the bike due to poor condition brake shoes which observed later and needs the correction and in turn of high cost of repair.
• Standard of Quality is always be ZERO DEFECT , not close enough. : If any product does  not meet the requirements then the product  is not the quality product even if it close to meet the requirement, because on the basis of Zero Defect any non conformance is not, fore granted. The product is not acceptable and categorize as under quality product.
• Quality is measure on the basis of Price -  Price of Non Conformance ( PONC): This is the key principle, Crosby's believed that every defect incur a cost. To find and correct and prevent this defect organization introduces many steps like Inspection , Time , Rework,  Scrape , Collection of data of customer satisfaction etc. All these steps required a huge amount of money and so lot of revenue has lost to maintain all steps to prevent the defects and therefore to maintain the Quality, cost must considered. Every non-conformance contributes a cost in terms of loss of revenue due to it.

Related Article :

Juran's Quality Trilogy ,  Deming's System of Profound Knowledge , Deming's 14 Points