The Cost of Over-Quality - When your 8D solves the p...

Let me ask you an uncomfortable question. If a defect rate is only 0.1%, but under customer complaint pressure you spend a hundred times the cost to "eliminate" it — and then your customer switches suppliers a year later because your price increase was too much — did that 8D succeed or fail? Your D4 was correct. Your D6 was effective. Your D7 did horizontal deployment. But you lost a customer. Which section of the 8D do you write that in? After all these years in quality, I've noticed a dangerous habit in this industry. We're so obsessed with "zero defects" that almost nobody stops to ask: what's the cost of zero defects? I'm not saying quality isn't important — of course it is. What I'm saying is that quality engineers sometimes fall into a kind of "perfectionist anxiety" — the feeling that if any defect escapes, it's a personal failure. And driven by this anxiety, the solutions we design in D5 start to drift from "reasonable and reliable" to "cost is no object." Nobody ever told you that your 8D solution should have a return on investment. I've seen this tragedy play out more than once, and the plot...