Zero Defects

What is it?
 Zero Defects, pioneered by Philip Crosby, is a business practice which aims to reduce and
minimize the number of defects and errors in a process and to do things right the first time.
 The ultimate aim will be to reduce the level of defects to zero.
 More recently the concept of zero defects has lead to the creation and development of six
sigma pioneered by Motorola and now adopted worldwide by many other organizations.
How can it be used?
The concept of zero defects can be practically utilised in any situation to improve quality and
reduce cost. A process, system or method of working has to be established which allows for the
achievement of zero defects.
Advantages
 Cost reduction caused by a decrease in waste. This waste could be both wasted materials and
wasted time due to unnecessary rework
 Cost reduction due to the fact that time is now being spent on only producing goods or
services that are produced according to the requirements of consumers.
 Possible to measure the cost of quality
Disadvantages
 A process can be over engineered by an organization in its efforts to create zero defects.
While trying to create a situation of zero defects increasing time and expense may be spent in
an attempt to build the perfect process that delivers the perfect finished product.
Six Sigma is allied to the zero defects (zee-dee) drive.
 Six sigma standards theoretically help in reducing defects to just 3.4 in one million units.
 Six sigma concept was found at Motorola and perfected by giants such as GE.
What is Six Sigma?
 It is a letter of the Greek alphabet. It is used to indicate the extent to which a process can vary
without causing errors in the operation.
 Six sigma is a strategic tool that aims at very high quality standards.
 In a company that is adopting six sigma, all the money that would usually go to activity like
inspection, rework, warranties and customer service.
 Most of the world players operate between three and four sigma
Defect rate of 66,000 DPMO.
 Indian companies Operate on two sigma Defect rate of 3,08,000 DPMO
 If companies on six sigma defect rate will be cut down to 3.4 DPMO this what is
termed as Zero defects.
 If company operates on two sigma 30 – 40 percent of the sales is used up as cost of
poor quality.

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  If company operates on six sigma cost of poor quality is reduced to less than 5
percent “HUGE SAVING” to the Company.
 Six sigma approaches is attractive, but not easy to achieve. Adopting six sigma approaches,
the organization will become better in all business aspects that include.
o Customer satisfaction of the situation, standards for the manufacturing process and its
parameters are set
o Employee growth
o Increase in share price.
QUALITY LEVEL MEANING
One sigma 6,90,000 defects per million parts produced
Two sigma 3,08,000 defects per million parts produced
Three sigma 66,800 defects per million parts produced

Four sigma 6, 210 defects per million parts produced

Five sigma 230 defects per million parts produced

Six sigma 3.4 defects per million parts produced

How six sigma works

 Making of a product involves many operations.
 This creates many opportunities for the occurrence of errors of right from the design to
shipment stage. To take care of the situation, standards for the manufacturing process and its
parameters are set.
 When the process or product does not conform to the set standards, they show variations in
the range of  1σ, 2σ and so on from the process mean. These variations are plotted to get a
normal distribution curve.
Three Sigma
If 3σ is adopted the process distribution curve will have upper specification limit (USL) at 3σ to the
right and lower specification limit (LSL) at 3σ to the left of the process mean.

 The area under the curve that is between LSL and USL represent the products that satisfy the
pre-specified standards.

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  Hence the defective products account for 0.27% of the total area, that is 2700 defect in a
million parts. As the process can shift 1.5σ from the process average, the area between the
LSL and USL changes to 93.32% of the total area that leads to more than 66,000 DPMO.
Six sigma
If 6σ is adopted the process distribution curve will have upper specification limit (USL) at 6σ to the
right and lower specification limit (LSL) at 6σ to the left of the process mean.

 The area under the curve that is between LSL and USL will account for 99.9976% of the total
area under the curve.
 These mean 0.002 defects in a million opportunities. This implies a process with zero defects.
But when the process shift of 1.5σ is taken into account in the process shown in figure below the
DPMO increases to 3.4 Parts per Million

Six sigma implementation:

There are 8 steps in implementation Six sigma. They are called “R- DMAIC”(Recognize,
Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control,)
Recognise:
 Find the starting point looking into hurdles in culture, policies and procedure.
Define:
 Define the goals of the improvement activity and chart out plans.

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Measure:
 Measure the existing system
 Establish proper metrics to monitor the goals stated in the previous step.
Analyze:
 Identify gaps between the current performance of the system and the target aimed at.
Improve:
 To fill up the gap identify in the previous step, focus on improving the system by adopting
creativity to do things in better, cheaper and faster manner.
Control:
 In order to maintain a superior output after improving the system, it is essential to monitor the
critical to value system level parameters.
SIX SIGMA ADVANTAGES
Improvement
 Customer satisfaction
 Employee satisfaction
 Profits
 Productivity
 Competitiveness
Reduction
 DPMO(Defects Per Million Opportunities)
 Cost of production
 Work in process
 Cycle time.
Failure mode and effect Analysis (FEMA)
 FEMA is a structured analytical technique done on paper that consists of the following
activities.
 Identifying and evaluating the possible route causes of failure of a product and its
effects.
 Generation of action plans to prevent, detect or reduce the impact and chance of the
potential occurrence of failure.
 Documenting the process.
 Thus FEMA encourages the design team to consider:
 What could go wrong?
 How badly it could go wrong?
 What is to be done to prevent or reduce the problem?
 Thus FEMA is an activity that is performed before the occurrence of an event with an aim to
implement considerably inexpensive changes in product design or production process.
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Type of FEMA
There are two types of FEMA
a) Design or product FEMA
b) Process FEMA
Design or Product FEMA
 Design FEMA helps during the design process in the following ways:
 To identify the failure modes.
 To rank the failures based on their impact on the product.
 Following are the benefits of design FEMA
 Reduces cost of manufacturing process.
 Reduces development time
 Bring to light the error made.
 Eliminates most of the failure modes before the operation
 To the designed product, document the results of the design.
Process FEMA
 Process FEMA helps in the following ways:
 To identify the process failure mode.
 To rank the failures based on their impact on the internal or external customer.
 Following are the benefits of design FEMA
 To identify the production or assembly failures.
 To specify controls in order to reduce occurances.
 To document the results of the production process.
Failure rate in FEMA
 Most of the products or processes follow the exponential distribution pattern of failure. The
probability of survival of the product or process is given by

Where Pt = period of operation without failure

T = time specified for operation without failure
ƛ = Failure rate.
Types of failure:
 Debug- This is due to mistake in design and manufacturing
 Chance – due to accident, poor maintenance and limitation in design
Wear out – this is occurs after the product has served for its economic life period.

Functions of FEMA

The design or process FEMA can provide the following functions:

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  To find how the failure of any item will affect other items in the product or process.
 Separating out clearly those failure modes that cause the maximum damage to the product.
 Aiming to reduce or eliminate negative effects due to assembly failures.
 Provide training to the needful employees.
 To see that product meets the requirement of the customers.

Stages of FEMA:
The four types of FMEA are as follows:
1. Specifying
 Functions
 Possible Failure modes.
 Root causes
 Effects
 prevention
2. Quantifying
 Probability of cause
 Risk priority number
3. Correcting
 Detailing
 Check points on completion.
4. Re-evaluation
 Recalculation of risk priority

Fault Tree Analysis

Introduction

 There is a need to analyze all the possible failure mechanisms in complex systems (e.g.
nuclear power plants)
 Also perform probabilistic analyses for the expected rate of failures
 Estimate probabilities of events that are modelled as logical combinations or logical outcomes
of other random events
 Two main methods:
 fault tree analysis
 event tree analysis
 Decision trees also exist and are used in risk analysis (combines all feasible alternatives,
possible outcomes and their probabilities, monetary consequences and utility evaluations)
 Other graphical methods include
 Reliability block diagrams
 Functional logic diagrams
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  Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA)

Fault Tree Analysis

 A technique by which many events that interacts to produce other events can be related using
simple logical relationships.
 One of the principal methods of probabilistic safety (or risk) analysis (PRA)
 fault tree diagrams
o Are used most often as a system-level risk assessment technique
o Can model the possible combinations of equipment failures, human errors, and
external conditions that can lead to a specific type of accident
o Follow a top-down structure and represent a graphical model of the pathways within a
system between basic events that can lead to a foreseeable loss event (or a failure)
referred to as the top event
 The contributory events and conditions are interconnected using standard logic symbols
(AND, OR, etc.), also referred to as gates
 Events that must coexist to cause the top event are described using the AND relationship
 Alternate events that can individually cause the top event are described using the OR
relationship
 The occurrence of a top event may or may not lead to a serious or adverse consequence
 the relative likelihood of a number of potential consequences will depend on the conditions or
subsequent events that follow
 Potential consequences can be systematically identified using an event tree.

Advantages
 Simple to understand and easy to implement
 Qualitative descriptions of potential problems and combinations of events causing specific
problems of interest
 Quantitative estimates of failure frequencies and likelihoods, and relative importances of
various failure sequences and contributing events
 Lists of recommendations for reducing risks
 Quantitative evaluations of recommendation effectiveness

Limitations
 Difficult to conceive all possible scenarios leading to the top event
 Construction of fault trees for large systems can be tedious
 Subjective decisions regarding the level of detail and completeness are often necessary.