Author Archives: Graham Freeman

About Graham Freeman

Graham Freeman is a writer based in Toronto, where he covers technology, ESG, and sustainability news. Graham has been a content and technical writer in the technology industry for more than a decade. He has also worked as a professor and lecturer at Queen’s University, the University of Toronto, and George Brown College.

Quality Failures Can Leave You In the Dark

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July 13, 2019, a massive power outage plunged a significant portion of New York City into darkness. The outage began Saturday just before 7:00 pm. 73,000 people were in the dark until just after midnight. 

Graphic of a frontline worker fixing a power line

A five-hour power outage may seem relatively insignificant. It certainly pales in comparison to some other more famous power outages. For example, on March 31, 2015, 70 million people in Turkey were without power for more than seven hours. On July 31, 2012, 670 million people in India lost power for between two and eight hours. The famous North American blackout on August 14, 2003 impacted significant portions of the northwestern U.S. and Canada, with more than 50 million people in the dark for between 16-72 hours in the USA and up to 192 hours in Canada. (Veloza and Santamaria 2016)  

New York, however, is one of the world’s most significant metropolitan centres, the hub for a financial network that spans the globe. When a location like New York loses critical infrastructure, the impacts cascade and resonate across financial, transportation, and business systems. 

Power … Read more...

Volkswagen Dieselgate and the Culture of Quality

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In early 2014, the International Council on Clean Transportation began working with researchers at West Virginia University’s Center for Alternative Fuels, Engines, and Emissions (CAFEE) to follow up on reported discrepancies in the emissions of Volkswagen diesel vehicles. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) had previously subjected the vehicles to rigorous emissions testing in the laboratory, and the vehicles had all passed with no indication of any problems. The CAFEE researchers did their emissions test in the field and produced some very different results.[i]

Graphic of volkswagons polluting a city and nature

The researchers discovered that when operating in the real world, the vehicles produced emissions that fell far outside the limits allowed for diesel vehicles to be certified in the United States. After more testing, the researchers discovered a sophisticated software application that used environmental data from the vehicle, such as the absence of movement from the steering wheel, to determine when the vehicle was being … Read more...

The Space Shuttle Disasters and Quality Management

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On January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger was destroyed 73 seconds after lifting off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Seven crew members died, a $3 billion-dollar orbital vehicle was lost, and NASA’s Space Shuttle program was suspended for 32 months.

Graphic of a space shuttle taking off through space

The official cause of the disaster was the failure of an O-ring to prevent hot gases from leaking through the joint in the solid rocket motor during launch.[i] The Rogers Commission – the body tasked with investigating the disaster – found that the O-ring design had been a point of concern for several years prior to the disaster, but that any concerns had been either poorly communicated or ignored in favor of maintaining project delivery on-time and on-budget.[ii]

In addition to the faulty initial design of the O-rings, the Commission determined that the unusually cold temperatures at the time of the launch (conditions in which none of the … Read more...

The Culture of Quality in the Automotive Industry

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Each industry will have different interpretations of the concept of Quality and how to prioritize its tenets within their own field of practice, expertise and work experience. Perhaps the best fundamental principle is the definition of Quality from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as “the degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fulfills requirements where a requirement is a need or expectation.”

Graphic of frontline workers working at an auto plant

Automotive quality management dates to Henry Ford’s vision of a trained workforce assembling mass-produced vehicles with consistency and precision. Today, automotive quality reflects three principles:

  • Quality in Product means the ability of the vehicle to fulfil its expected functions and behavior, such as engine efficiency, product features and environmental exhaust standards.
  • Quality in Production means producing vehicles of a consistent quality standard while working within defined cost constraints.
  • Quality in Ownership relates to customer satisfaction during their ownership of the vehicle. This includes the customer experience
… Read more...

What Can Go Wrong, Will Go Wrong: Deepwater Horizon

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ISO 9000:2015 Quality Management Systems – Fundamentals and Vocabulary gives the definition of Quality as the “degree to which a set of inherent characteristics of an object fulfills a requirement.” While this broad definition might bring to mind many of the traditional Quality ideals, such as process efficiency and customer delight, perhaps less obvious are the potential costs of Quality failures and the impact they can have on the environment, a company brand, and human lives.

Graphic of the deepwater horizon polluting waters

On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon, an oil rig leased to BP Exploration & Production from Transocean for extracting oil from the Macondo well 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana, suffered a series of explosions caused by the uncontrolled flow and ignition of oil from the well onto the rig platform during exploratory drilling. Explosions, and the resulting inextinguishable fire, continued to rock the Deepwater Horizon for 36 hours, killing 11 … Read more...