W. Edwards Deming, widely regarded as having had more impact upon Japanese manufacturing and business than any other individual not of Japanese heritage, is famous for saying you can’t inspect quality into a product. The US government shutdown is one more example of how dangerous relying on inspections can be.

Some of you may be intimately familiar with the US government shutdown. Essentially, Congress failed to pass a spending bill and the government has stopped providing services that are not considered “essential.”

Without getting too political (for example, I won’t mention that Congress and the president are exempt from the furlough and continue to get paid), I wanted to report on a few impacts of the shutdown from a quality-related and inspection perspective.

For example, according to Reuters, the U.S. government shutdown is blocking Boeing and Airbus from delivering aircraft to U.S. airlines and raising safety concerns, even though hundreds of furloughed workers have been recalled (it could have been, and was for a short time, worse).

It’s a question of having government workers available to certify components, and finalize delivery of completed aircraft. It is uncertain when these certification and inspection procedures will operate normally.

Unsettling.

The closure of one Registry office in Oklahoma City, similar to a DMV but for aircraft, has stymied almost 1.5 billion US dollars in private plane deliveries. Not quite Quality-related, but certainly one that may lead to shortcuts being taken in established procedures once the floodgates do re-open – and that is yet another Quality concern with consequences.

Besides aircraft, there’s the air traffic control system itself. Radar, buildings and other equipment need frequent inspections. Many of these are not considered critical – and are not being done. Over time, these could build upon themselves.

And the quality challenge isn’t just limited to machines, an article in “Medical Daily” reports that FDA Food Safety Inspections have been suspended. The government has furloughed 60% of the Inspectors.

Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety at the Center for Science in the Public Interest says, “For every day the government is shut down, it’s going to take them many weeks to make up the work that’s not being done. When they come back to work there’ll be a backlog of plants that should have been visited during this period that aren’t being visited. Our inspection system is already pretty anemic, and now it’s not even moving, now it’s totally dysfunctional.”

Safe food to our tables, with the existing process, relies on these inspections – they aren’t happening. And when they do begin again, what are the chances they’ll be done with the same [already suspect] care they had before the shutdown?

I’m not saying doing away with all inspection is possible, or even practical – but the need for inspection is a symptom of an imperfect system. Processes that have embedded controls, for example, or utilize mistake proofing (poka yoke) techniques have a proven track record of higher reliability and are less expensive to operate.

We might learn from what is being reported as our government inspection and certification processes fail with the removal of adequate resources. One lesson is clear: reliance on inspection, often one of the last steps in a process, creates a bottleneck in production, and likely long-term reliability issues once the process is restarted.

Do Mr. Deming proud, and consider where you have inspection steps in your processes, and see what you can do to eliminate them, without sacrificing quality.

Do that, go forth – and calibrate thyself.

Sal