Quality Controls

Quality is not something which can be imposed on the production process; To be successful it has to be something which is inherent in the system itself. So ingrained in the system that from outside it is not evident at all but becomes apparent when you are inside the system. From outside it may appear to you as no logic or at best a fuzzy logic but actually it is so much part of the process that to experience it you have to be inside the production process.
TQM or quality circles are something which are imposed from outside and hence require constant efforts to reinforce their beliefs and procedures and after that constant monitoring audit and checks. By introducing checks and audit you take away the individuality, creativity and the inherent desire of the individual to create things and have the passion to make it better and better. Of course it has its own plus points and own advantages but somehow after having worked in a company which we started from scratch in 1994 and to have made it world’s largest in its category in 2004, I have started believing that the creativity of innocence, continuous evolution of the organization as a living organism is more important than these rules and audits.
A quality circle is a two dimensional figure and if you take any point and start from it you will ultimately end up in the same place after going around it in periphery. You can not add or subtract any thing from it, otherwise the circle will have to be changed or broken and a new one formed in its place. This is a major drawback which inhibits its continuous evolution as a living organism and to readjust itself to the changing environment of production process. You can not change your quality requirement or process of doing it every now and then and put into place a new one. The process itself should have the capability to modify and readjust itself. This is the essence or a very brief basis of what we cal, quality helix.
The requirements therefore are:-
1. The system to be a living organism of the total production process.
2. It is inherent in the system itself, and becomes visible or evident when you are part of the process.
3. It should not be imposed from outside or bound by rules and audits.
4. It should continuously evolve itself or upgrade itself as the requirement arises.
5. It should allow people to have a creativity of innocence.

God has given us five senses that are, touch, smell, taste, hear and see. When we can decide very effectively what is good for us to hear, what is good for us to eat, what is good for us to smell, what is good for us to touch and lastly more important what is good for us to see then I do not why we can utilize these thing effectively to decide what is good enough for us to produce and what not to produce. We are very good consumers , we know what to buy and what not to buy, how much we should pay and what quality is good enough for us. Why can not we take these concepts to the production process itself?
Why helix? Helix is structure of DNA the basic essence or a basic building block of life. And every life has to have a DNA which is helix in shape. A helix is a three dimensional figure as compared to two of circle. It has no beginning and no end and therefore we may call it an infinite structure. We can add anything to it or remove anything from it without altering it basic structure and it still remains a DNA and is helix in structure. This addition or deletion may create a new DNA but its structure remains the same and qualities same. In essence it still remains the same living organism capable of evolving improving and capable of absorbing any new information that is fed into it and becoming something new which is better.
Before I go into the concepts I would like to say something about the company because it will help one to understand the concept better and dispel some of the widely held concepts that skill is essential to a product process and skilled people are required if the process is to be a good one. In our company we had no qualified person, no engineers, no technicians, no MBA , just people with a lot of common sense, passion and an attitude and aptitude to learn new thing, experiment, fail and get up again to become “ Better and Better”. All our workers were unskilled workers whose sole criteria that they should not have any previous work experience. We believed in creating the required skills, allowing workers to decide what they should do, how they should do a
And how to improve the system themselves. Just for the record our maintenance in charge who maintained our fully automatics filling line machines to over 99% of efficiency is an illiterate man who can not even read a single manual and after 4 years learned to sign his name.
We basically used certain concepts which by themselves do not mean anything and sometimes appear to people as stupid and irrelevant. But the trick lies in how to put them into practice and also how to make the unskilled worker understand them. These are:-
1. As mentioned earlier that if we can decide what is good for us then why we can not decide what is good to produce.
2. The human body is a perfect filtration system. We eat things the body decides what is good and retains it and throws out the unwanted. A normal filtration system works on the same concept. You have successive filters to remove unwanted or bad things and out come pure water.
3. The immunization process. We take shots in order to immunize ourselves from the diseases. It is done by introducing live germs into the body, the white cells generate antibodies to fight this small amount and hence the body develops an immunity to fight the disease effectively.
4. Every person is an excellent customer so why he can not decide what is good to produce and what is not good to produce so that he can buy what is good

It is when you implement these concepts into your manufacturing process that the process becomes alive and inbuilt into the system and evolve itself.
I am sorry that I have gone into too much background detail which may appear to be too simple and too theoretical to be implemented into practice. But the beauty of it lies in its simplicity. We are very good at complicating things, adding new rules, new procedures, checks and audits but do we ever get down seriously and work in a deliberate manner to simplify thing. Simplification is too easy to talk about but is the most difficult part to practice.
We can go into detail about the process of implementation of these concepts once we have thrashed out and clear about what all these entail. We will also have to understand something about the company, its culture, style, value system and rules and the concept behind these rules in order to better understand the processes.
I apologize for this long note which in my opinion is too short for me to covey our passion to create something new and different, but I sincerely hope that you will bear with me otherwise we may land up into a situation where we will be asking the basic question” Was Christ a black man or a White man.”