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Everyone has brought out great points which deserve to be respected. The passion to believe that 'Zero Defect' is NOT an impossibility is very encouraging. However, prior to this debate, the question was initially asked as a Yes / No question with no conditions and no room for explanations or deeper interpretations - "Is Zero Defect achievable?". All the answers that support this have some conditions attached., viz. it comes with a cost, it is possible with sufficient planning, could be done with mistake proofing, it is a management concept etc. etc. I am a strong supporter of the zero defect thought process, but when it comes to answering this question unconditionally, I would maintain a "no". No quality standard is complete without a "corrective action" clause. Big brands do have well defined customer service clauses that include warranty services and product recall procedures. Inspection and rework lines are built in even the best of production lines. Robust design and Mistake proofing techniques have greatly helped in improving efficiencies and reducing human dependencies and thus reduced errors. Even then, it is hard to find a 100% mistake proofing for all processes in a production line or a service industry. Even a 7 sigma process is termed as 'Near Perfection', but still not perfect! All of us know that the normal distribution will touch the X axis only at infinity! When we buy a product, say a Television set, we expect it to perform defect free for a reasonable period of time. In a large population of TV sets from highly reputed manufacturer, the defect rate is expected to be extremely low, but certainly it is still not zero. You may visit the nearest service center for any product to find out! Yet for those small portion of affected customers, what is considered very important is the prompt response and remedy with least inconvenience. When we say zero defect, it cannot be even one in a million. It is very important to encourage the philosophy of 'zero defect', and continuously strive towards it, but one has to be very careful before making a claim of achievement. An organization might do its best to overcome most of the factors that are controllable, but there are factors that may not be controllable and it wouldn't be practical to build a factor of safety for all such factors. We should not permit over complacency to set in that would come in the way of planning good remedial and recovery plans, for which failures need to be anticipated and mitigation plans built in. Many safety systems that necessarily may not prevent failures, either due to product or due to external factors, but help in reducing severity of the impact in an 'unlikely' event. Just as in an FMEA exercise, we tend to prioritize the actions based Severity, Occurrence and Detection, but may not necessarily eliminate all possibilities 100%. The "Zero defect" thought process will continue to be key driver for continuous improvement, and would help to intelligently understand and manage the variabilities more proactively to provide products and services that keep up with ever revising Quality and Reliability expectations.

Dear Mr. Venugopal, you will appreciate that nothing is possible unconditional or occur in isolation. There are always certain set of conditions required to complete a task. If you ask me 'can you cook - write yes or no? What should I write...'yes' I can cook provided I have gas stove, utensils, raw material, etc. or should I reply 'no' as I cannot cook unconditionally. How would you respond to this question?? There are always certain prerequisites for the completion of job and that is what is discussed by people who feel 'zero defects is achievable if proper procedures are put in place. The reply can be negative only if we feel, come what may, it cannot be achieved. You also wrote "I am a strong supporter of the zero defect thought process......It is very important to encourage the philosophy of 'zero defect', and continuously strive towards it". I think one can support and encourage a philosophy only if one believes in it!!

Mr. Venugopal very rightly pointed out that obsession of punctuality in airline sector can endanger the lives of passengers, so is zero defect in this case desirable? Likewise, can we expect an iota of intolerance or defect in the functioning of machine like airplane which can lead to causality of severe level. Isn’t zero defect mandatory here? I repeat the question of debate “Is zero defect achievable”? Can we achieve zero defects – yes or no? It does not talk about its desirability, cost-effectiveness or specific industry – product or services…let’s request the Coordinators of this Excellence program to make it next question Let me also bring the concept of mistake proofing here…and study it through the example of two very commonly visible gadgets i.e. Burglar alarm (Circuit breaker) and Water filters. Burglar alarm goes off the moment circuit is broken and in water filters, water stops flowing in the tank once it reaches a particular level. What are we doing…setting certain markers which gives indication the moment there is any deviation in given situation. Guess we can effectively use similar devices in defect prevention and control; which is the basic premise of ‘Mistake proofing’ i.e. to prevent a defect from occurring and detect defects as soon as possible if they occur. Implementation of this approach in conjunction with other similar ones at various levels can definitely make zero defect achievable. Another point in favour is, when we say nowadays machines can work at highest level of precision; shouldn’t that mean output of such machines will be of ‘zero defect’. What is zero defect? The definition says, “it is a management tool aimed to eliminate defects and, a policy which aims to motivate people to prevent mistake by developing a constant desire to do there job right the first time.” Do we think this approach is impractical? With proper planning, techniques, policies and continuous monitoring; the objective of ‘Zero defect’ is surely not impossible...will come with cost, deliberation and technology of highest level, agree but then it is achievable!!

I agree with Ms. Reena And Ms. Kavitha but I would like to add some points to explain more for Mr Venugopal as I am not agree with you because here we are not talking about zero defect in general. We are talking about zero defect in industries, services sector, telecom sector, manufacturers, car manufacturers, vehicle manufacturers and many more. For any organisation business performance and profit making and satisfaction of customer is the main goal. If any organisation has aimed to achieve some financial goal with satisfaction of customer and if they achieve it then we can say that they have zero defects. It depends on how we are interpreting it and where we are applying it. I agree with Ms Kavitha that it involves a lot of cost and previous planning also. If we talk about car Manufacturing industry then here we have different methods to meausre JD Power customer service index, customer satisfaction index and Initial quality study. For example if I give example for Honda City, it has IQS score on first position since last more than 10 years and Honda aims to be number one in IQS study, and Honda is achieving it continously year after year, although they have invested huge to achieve and maintain consistency on first position in its segment, here we can say that Honda is achieving zero defects because Honda aimed to be number one and achieving it also.

There are many situations where we really require zero defect. like already pointed out "Surgical set up" , or a "plane landing". The question here is not about zero defect required or not.. It is about "Is zero defect achievable?" When we say zero defect does it mean: 1. Absolutely no defect from a process... for how much duration? For ever? 2. Are we drawing some upper and lower tolerance on % defects or DPMO. and so long as the defect rate falls with in a service level agreement, are we going to accept it as zero defects? 3. if we are talking about a particular product, on which multiple defects can manifest,... when we say zero defect, are we referring to the non-occurrence of a particular defect or do we mean that no defect type should occur? 4. Are we referring to only the final output? Are we ok to have inprocess defects, but the final outcome is expected to be zero defect? 5. When we say zero defect, are we ignoring other factors like delivery time, processing cost, productivity etc? WHAT IS ZERO DEFECT? DEFINE IT.