Inspection is an overhead cost. It does not add any intrinsic value to the product or service, and so it should be an objective to keep costs associated with inspections to a minimum. After all;

1. You can’t inspect quality into a job
2. Design and manage quality into the process, build confidence into the product and you reduce the need for inspection

However I am starting to wonder whether we sometimes get carried away with ourselves. My point being that there will usually be some benefit in a level of inspection. I think that is particularly true when we think about service provision. You see service delivery processes are different to production processes in at least one important way. That is, we are usually dealing with a variable input (i.e the customer and his requests) and this means our process will be inherently and unavoidably more variable. In short, it is a people to people process, and people are much harder to program, control and maintain than machines and components. They also have the infuriating talent of being able to vary in ways we could not have anticipated, which is generally not true of materials and machine parts

Other people may take a different view, but I have long believed that it is a bit naive to think we can take our tried and tested quality methodologies from, say, Toyota, and transplant them wholesale to, say, local government, education or hospitality. We can learn some lessons for sure, but we do need to take the right tool for the right job. I know some people who are so obsessed by their favourite model to the extent they think it can deal with anything they care to throw at it. If the only tool you possess is a hammer, don’t be surprised if all your problems start looking like nails

Recently I’ve started to take the view that to try to design inspection out of many service delivery processes might simply be asking for trouble. Watch the video clip

Now, I’m not sure how many of you have ever enjoyed “The Starbucks Experience” but let me tell you, it ain’t always like that. I have no problem with a company that invests time and resources training and educating its people in that way, but then to simply expect it to happen, day in, day out, really? Truth be told people have good and bad days and if you really want to know what is going on, there is no substitute for “mystery shopper”. In fact I’d say it should be compulsory. I am in no way surprised at how vibrant the service appears to be in the video clip, when the cameras are so clearly rolling, but what happens on a damp Tuesday morning when no-one is apparently looking? A year ago I was so shocked by deteriorating standards of service in the USA I ranted about it in a post, naming names to such an extent that Ezine refused to re-publish it. You’ll note Starbucks was mentioned. In that post I do give the USA credit for previously leading the world in customer orientated service provision. My point is that if lapses like that can happen in the US, it can happen anywhere

Last year I worked with a College of Further Education that had used an agency to generate data through “mystery shopper” and they learned a lot, I can tell you. All this has made me think that maybe good old fashioned inspection has gone and got itself a bad name over the past 30 years, and that possibly we need to accept that it should always have a place set for it at the table