Most efforts at solving a quality problem start in the boardroom and unfortunately spend too much time there. This is where we brainstorm and throw our ideas on the table for review. The place to be when you're trying to solve a quality problem is on the factory floor where the problem is created. Like a detective trying to solve a crime, you need to be at the scene of the crime and collecting clues. This sounds obvious but it is surprising how infrequently people take this approach.
I was working with a group in China a few years back and there was a quality problem that caused significant numbers of their product to fail and they had not been able to determine the root cause. Upstream in their process was a 12-station rotary table that was used for swaging (forming metal). There were no labels on this rotary table identifying station 1 vs 2 vs 3 etc. So we labelled them 1 to 12 and then took items off the process and lined them up in several rows of 12. It was there right in front of us. Station #5 produced terrible product. The company management was impressed with how quickly we resolved a long-standing quality problem.
Brainstorming doesn't work. Gathering evidence does.
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Monday, July 21, 2008
Quality Problems in Manufacturing
In 2005, CME's 20/20 Magazine published results from a Management Issues Survey. The least satisfactory skill set among employees in Manufacturing was Problem Solving. 
All manufacturers have quality problems. Plenty of them. We tend to assign these to our technical employees assuming that they possess the required skills. Engineers will certainly have strong math skills and engineering intuition. But this isn’t enough. There are other elements of problem solving that need to be known such as nonparametric statistics, variation reduction strategies and components of variance techniques. Problem solving is a skill that can be learned. It’s important, indeed necessary, that manufacturers develop problem solving skills among their employees and dedicate a small team to doing nothing else.
All manufacturers have quality problems. Plenty of them. We tend to assign these to our technical employees assuming that they possess the required skills. Engineers will certainly have strong math skills and engineering intuition. But this isn’t enough. There are other elements of problem solving that need to be known such as nonparametric statistics, variation reduction strategies and components of variance techniques. Problem solving is a skill that can be learned. It’s important, indeed necessary, that manufacturers develop problem solving skills among their employees and dedicate a small team to doing nothing else. Thursday, July 10, 2008
Quantify and Rank Your Quality Problems
A lot of folks tend to dismiss the Pareto chart as a simple bar chart with little value. But the pareto chart shows us the distribution of many phenomena including earnings and losses. The chart posted here shows athletes' salaries in June 2008. I chose this one rather than an industrial example to show the universality of the pareto principle. When we are talking about solving problems in manufacturing, knowing which problem ranks #1 is highly valuable. Here's why. The difference between successive entries on a pareto is alway a trivial amount except the top one or two. So your top problem, measured by cost, will outrank your second problem not by 2% or 5% but 50% or 100% or more. It is well worth collecting data on all your top problems to see which one is top dog.
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