I wonder how we survived 200 years of industrialization without it.
We did, but jobs were being done nowhere nearly as well as they should have been done. This is more along the lines of lean manufacturing than quality, but consider brick laying as practiced for thousands of years. Here is a video from more than 100 years ago (probably using Thomas Edison's movie technology) in which you can see a skilled mason laying bricks.
He is bending over to pick up each brick, and can lay 125 an hour. Frank Gilbreth introduced a non-stooping scaffold to deliver the bricks at waist level, whereupon the mason could lay 350 an hour. This proved that the job, as designed originally, wasted 64% of the workers' labor. Henry Ford pointed out that some farm jobs wasted up to 95% of the labor.
The jobs therefore got done, and with steam and then electric power to help, but they did not get done as well as they should have been done. Quality problems were frequent and often deadly. Steam boiler explosions led to ASME's safety codes. The
Titanic sank because her rivets contained too much slag, and apparently gave way to aggravate the flooding after the ship hit an iceberg.
I use the talking point, "Invisible when present, conspicuous when absent" with regard to ISO 9001, the position also taken by Tubecon (
ISO 9001 | Tubecon). When the standard is in place and being used for its intended purpose, the quality problems don't happen and the standard is taken for granted. When the standard is absent (or not being used effectively), the consequences make themselves known pretty quickly. The airline industry, most of which is not registered to ISO 9001, kept stranding passengers on runaways and putting their lives at risk (as shown by the involvement of emergency response vehicles in a couple of cases) because no corrective action was taken to prevent a recurrence. The health care industry throws away about a trillion dollars a year on inefficiencies and preventable medical errors, again due to lack of effective quality management systems. The health care industry "works," to the extent that we are much better off with it than without it, but it is still the third leading cause of death in the United States (after cardiovascular disease and cancer).
Re: "They're spending $100,000 on this thing, and I can't get a nickel to improve the product." If the quality system, ISO 9001 or otherwise, identifies a risk or opportunity related to the product, and you can't get resources to act on it, then management is not using the standard properly. This applies to any quality program.
