Variation is among us everywhere. If we take household plants as an example, they vary in shape, size, colour, age, feeding times etc. This is also true for commercial processes, as there will always be variation within its inputs and outputs. Therefore, to ensure customer specifications are met and that Craftsmanship attributes are not put at risk, companies seek to minimise variation, both to increase performance probability and to minimise scrap.
However hard manufacturers try to manufacture their products, it would be very difficult to manufacture components identical to each other. Therefore manufactures insisted to produce them similar enough ensuring that they had no impact to the customer requirements. This led to manufactures ensuring any manufacturing process is 100% compliant to customer specifications.
Specifications became the magic boundaries, which process owners and production personnel differentiated "good" outputs from "bad". Whilst conflicts remain regarding where these specifications should lie between customer and supplier, some practitioners however, adopted the "goalpost" model by shipping components that "are close enough" to specification. This approach can heavily compromise the quality of the final product, as non-complaint material could lead to some of the quality problems previously highlighted.
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