Overview

Quality has always been essential to our product of engines for airplanes, and that quality has always been rigidly controlled. In fact, our product made us passionate about quality. We knew we could not let 400 people get on an airplane and hope we had done the right thing. The weight of responsibility for lives was just too heavy to be uncertain. So it was not as if, sometime in the early 1980s, we suddenly discovered that having quality products would be a good idea. We already knew that, and we were already delivering the best quality that money could buy. In fact, that was the problem. Our approach to quality was to throw money at it. We would make some parts, and our inspectors would inspect them. Good parts would go in one pile, and failing parts would either be reworked, scrapped, or inspected again by the customer and a team of engineering experts to see if they could be accepted as-is.

The good parts would be combined into subassemblies, which would be inspected and tested. Again, the good ones would go on; the failing subassemblies would be taken apart and fixed. Good subassemblies were joined together to become engine components that were inspected and tested. This process went on until we had a complete engine that had passed its own inspection and testing and was ready to be shipped to the customer. The process worked to deliver a quality product, but it was expensive, uncertain, and slow.

This...