What's Good for Defense…
Stanley A. Marash, Ph.D.
smarash@qualitydigest.com
I'm going to interrupt my series
of columns on change management to look at a timely subject:
the growth of quality initiatives from the aerospace and
defense industries. Most of us know that many high-tech
products have evolved from military and aerospace needs,
but we may have forgotten how much quality management owes
these industries.
After World War II and during the Cold War era, the U.S.
government sought to learn from its wartime experiences
by mandating rigorous quality standards. Determined to make
sense out of a plethora of individual product specifications,
the military hit upon the notion of a quality system standard.
Such guidelines would provide some level of assurance that
good quality was being produced "on purpose."
This approach would reduce the need for detailed product
inspections by substituting, in part, a detailed evaluation
of the contractor's procedures and practices.
The Department of Defense issued the first quality system
requirements in 1959 with Military Specification MIL-Q-9858,
"Quality Program Requirements," which remained
in force until it was replaced by ISO 9000, although it's
still "grand-fathered" on many contracts today.
Success, especially in reducing inspection workloads,
led to the sincerest form of flattery as other agencies
created their own derivatives of the standard. Three years
later, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
introduced Quality Publication NPC 200-2, "Quality
Program Provisions for Space System Contractors." A
nuclear quality system requirement followed in 1969. Soon
afterward, NATO developed its own series of Allied Quality
Assurance Procedures.
My career as a quality professional paralleled the introduction
of such system standards. In 1960, while completing a bachelor's
degree in applied statistics, I was interviewed for a job
by a retired admiral who was the shipyard superintendent
for the General Dynamics Electric Boat Co. in Groton, Connecticut,
which was building nuclear submarines for the U.S. Navy.
After a short interview, he said, "I have no idea what
a statistician is supposed to do, but the Navy's head of
quality says I need one, and your paperwork says you are
one, so the job is yours if you want it."
With no notion of what a quality control statistician
did, I took the job.
A few months later, the same person called me into his
office and announced: "I now know why I need a statistician.
The Department of Defense has issued a new standard, MIL-Q-9858,
which requires a documented quality system. We never had
this requirement before, nor have we had a quality control
statistician. Ergo, the task of complying with this requirement
is obviously yours."
I started this task immediately by differentiating the
multiple levels of required documentation (e.g., manuals,
procedures and instructions). It quickly became evident
that these documents' hierarchical nature was an important
feature, so we developed the documentation pyramid.
While we were developing this management system, the U.S.
Navy imposed another standard, MIL-Q-21459, specifically
developed for the Navy's Fleet Ballistic Missile program.
This program, then known as Polaris (later Poseidon and
currently Trident), involved launching torpedoes from nuclear
submarines that could cruise submerged for as long as six
months. Obviously, the requirements for reliability and
quality were extremely stringent and the consequences of
failure devastating.
One new Fleet Ballistic Missile requirement, for example,
was that contractors had to perform stringent internal audits
of their processes. So, in 1961 we initiated one of the
first comprehensive internal quality auditing programs.
In addition to documentation and auditing, other integral
features of military and aerospace standards included management
responsibility (specifically, the requirement for a central
authority for quality matters, with access to the highest
levels of management), corrective action processes, control
of purchasing, flow-down of requirements to suppliers and
subcontractors, control of measuring and test equipment,
identification and segregation of nonconforming product,
application of statistical methods, and other requirements
we now take for granted. Most significant, the MIL-Q-9858A
specification was all-inclusive, stating, "The program
shall assure adequate quality throughout all areas of contract
performance, for example, design, development, fabrication,
processing, assembly, inspection, test, maintenance, packaging,
shipping, storage and site installation."
This approach to quality management, along with the many
statistical measurement and prediction techniques that aerospace
and defense contractors developed to meet emerging requirements
of global defense and space exploration, soon migrated to
other sectors and became the basis for the ISO 9000-based
quality systems and continual improvement processes of the
last decade. Indeed, some phrasing and requirements migrated
almost verbatim from MIL-Q-9858A, including NATO standards,
the British Standards Institute standards, and the first
editions (circa 1987) of ISO 9001 and ISO 9002. In short,
much of what we do in industry today evolved from the national
security needs of the 1960s and 1970s.
Stanley A. Marash, Ph.D., is chairman and CEO of The
SAM Group, which includes STAT-A-MATRIX Inc. and Oriel Inc.
Letters to the editor regarding this column can be e-mailed
to letters@qualitydigest.com.
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