Is 99.9% "Good Enough"?
This hit my mailbox in Fall 1996. One of the many 90s business trends was "three nines" -- businesses should strive for 99.9% accuracy, 99.9% customer satisfaction, 99.9% quality, etc.
Is 99.9% "good enough"? If so...
- Two million documents will be lost by the IRS this year.
- 811,000 faulty rolls of 35mm film will be loaded this year.
- 22,000 checks will be deducted from the wrong bank accounts in the next 60 minutes.
- 1,314 phone calls will be misplaced by telecommunication services every minute.
- 12 babies will be given to the wrong parents each day.
- 268,500 defective tires will be shipped this year. [Gee: with the Firestones on Explorers, it looks like this one came true!]
- 14,208 defective personal computers will be shipped this year. [Well, yeah....]
- 103,260 income tax returns will be processed incorrectly this year. [ditto!]
- 2,488,200 books will be shipped with the wrong cover in the next 12 months.
- 132,412,800 cans of soft drinks produced in the next 12 months will be flatter than one of the 268,500 defective tires.
- Two plane landings daily at O'Hare International Airport will be unsafe.
- 3,056 copies of tomorrow's Wall Street Journal will be missing one of the three sections.
- 18,322 pieces of mail will be mishandled in the next hour.
- 291 pacemaker operations will be performed incorrectly this year.
- 880,000 credit cards in circulation will turn out to have incorrect cardholder information on their magnetic strips.
- $9,690 will be spent every day on defective, often unsafe sporting equipment.
- 55 malfunctioning automatic teller machines will be installed in the next 12 months.
- 20,000 incorrect drug prescriptions will be written in the next 12 months.
- 114,500 mismatched pairs of shoes will be shipped this year.
- $761,900 will be spent on tapes and CDs that won't play.
- 107 incorrect medical procedures will be performed each day.
- 315 entries in Webster's Third New International Dictionary of English Language will be misspelled.
And you thought 99.9% was good enough!!
Posted May 21, 2004 11:02 PM
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