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Quality and Risk Management in the IVF Laboratory
not work when they get them home. The company realizes that three out of every ten sets that it makes are apparently faulty – and is deeply concerned that very soon word of the customer complaints will spread and no-one will buy their product any more. So they install a man at the end of the production line whose job is to plug each TV set into the mains and check that it works before packing it into its carton: a quality control (QC) inspector. Very soon the complaints stop and customer satisfaction is at 100% – problem solved! But, the company’s financial controller soon realizes that 30% of their raw materials costs, and 30% of their manufacturing costs are going entirely to waste, being dumped into a skip out behind the factory and sent to the garbage dump. Such waste represents a very large part of the company’s profit margin – and it can’t go on. So, the non-working TVs are taken apart and the faults are identified and tabulated. The most common fault is found, perhaps a problem with soldering on the main circuit board, and the problem rectified. Now the QC inspector only has to reject three sets out of every twenty – the proportion of “good” TVs is now 85% instead of 70% – a major saving in costs. However, the financial controller is still not happy because profits are still not great and therefore insists that the next most common fault also be remedied, which, in due course, it is. Now only one in twenty of the TV sets coming off the production line doesn’t work: the waste is down to 5% and the proportion of “good” TVs is 95% – wonderful news! But the cost of employing the QC inspector is now greater than the cost of the wasted parts and labor and so the financial controller recommends that he be made redundant and the 5% wastage be written off. Fortunately for the QC inspector, the owner of the company believes that 5% of his customers being angry is still too many – after all, they might tell their friends about their bad experience and then they’ll buy their next TVs from another company. The owner decides to keep on the QC inspector until the manufacturing problems have been reduced to less than 1% – and so the engineers keep dealing with the less and less frequent manufacturing problems until they have reached the owner’s