Harold French Dodge, born 1893 in Lowell, Massachusetts, was one of the principal architects of the science of statistical quality control; concepts and methods used successfully for more than 50 years within virtually all kinds of manufacturing.
Somewhat surprisingly, many airline and rail operators still to this day are using inspection in trying to achieve quality in their crew management processes. They do so by enforcing a limit on an output from a bio-mathematical fatigue model, applying it to the very end of their manufacturing process of crew pairings and rosters. After they have been constructed.
Inspection can indeed be useful for gathering data on the process. Using that data to learn if a process has gone out of control and a special cause of variation needs to be investigated is useful. Using that data to evaluate the success, or failure, of an attempt to improve the process is also useful. However, inspecting in order to pull out and rework the failed items from the production before being passed on, is a path to failure. If the process is this bad, the process needs to be improved. Or as Harold put it:
“You can not inspect quality into a product"
The quality, good or bad, is already in the product. You are welcome to read in this one-pager about two very different approaches of managing fatigue risk in the crew management process. Welcome also to contact us here for a discussion on how we may help you to make a real difference to your fatigue risk exposure.