UPSIDE DOWN EXCELLENCE

Quality that's simple

Hey Reader

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Making quality the way your company operates will transform the way you do business.

Can I tell you a story of how I did it?

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One of my first roles in quality was helping my predecessor retire.

He was a brilliant, kind man, someone who had carried the company through the early days of ISO, QS, and TS. He’d seen it all and kept the system afloat through sheer determination and personal effort.

But the quality system he built?

It ran completely separate from the way the business operated.

We had two management reviews—one for “how we actually run the business” and a second for the quality system.

Environmental and safety systems? Completely separate documents. Each with their own reviews.

FMEAs, control plans, and PFMEAs were owned by quality alone, created in a vacuum and filed away. Never to be used again.

We had one internal auditor.

And for every external audit, he'd work 60–70 hours a week for six straight weeks to prepare.

When I took over, these were the expectations I inherited.

Quality was a separate thing, done on the side.

“Don’t worry about how the plant runs,” they told me. “Just focus on quality.”

I knew this wasn't sustainable. I couldn't work 60-70 hour weeks with a family and kids.

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Eventually, I'd learn that this wasn’t quality.

Quality Shouldn’t Be a Department

It should be part of how the business runs.

So I changed the game.

Here’s what we did:

1. I stopped preparing for audits.

The system had to stand on its own. No heroics. No fire drills. Seriously. One day, I just stopped. I let findings happen. When they did, we'd fix them and get better. Sounds scary, right? I admit I had a good start. The quality system he'd built had the right bones, it needed more people involved. So that's what I did. But I wasn't spending hours preparing for an audit. We learned and grew.

2. Production owned root cause analysis.

They created the problems. So they had to be a part of the solutions.Think about this: quality doesn't produce stuff. How ridiculous is it that quality needs to fix everyone else's problems?

I'd guide the team. I'd ask the questions, but they'd come up with the solutions.

3. We unified every disjointed system.

One document control system. One calibration system.One corrective action system.

One management review system—for quality, safety, environmental, and the business.

I was working with a brilliant, but stubborn and paranoid health and safety manager. He didn't let go easily. What worked was to find the stuff he struggled with the most.

Calibration was the first. He didn't have a good way to track environmental sensors.

Then corrective actions, because the production team already worked well with me, it helped him out to use my forms and my system. And we kept building.

This stuff doesn't happen overnight. I knew we could be more efficient together, so I kept looking for ways to do that.

4. Then we simplified.

Where we had five documents, we made one. If it didn’t help us run better, it didn’t survive.

I got in so much trouble with this one. Let me tell you the story...

We had just been bought out by a titan in the automotive industry. They knew the best way to make automotive parts, and they were going to instill their systems in us and fix our broken processes.

These guys were machinists and assembly line guys. We made casatings.

If you've never been, castings are made in a hot and dirty environment. Most things are on fire. There's smoke and dirt everywhere. When you go home, your boggers and ear wax are black (no joke). It looks like this:

Assembly lines are clean and pristine. Neat and orderly.

They had a process to go out (gemba) and review all the tools, instructions, and equipment for every part made on every line once per quarter. This practice makes sense when you make 10 parts in the entire facility.

In the foundry, we had 300 distinct part numbers, all of which could run on 5 different lines. Some of which were only made once per year. It wasn't feasible to check them all once per quarter, but that was the requirement.

So, what did I do? I disagreed with our new owners. This new requirement didn't serve our plant. It didn't add value. We didn't do it.

What I did instead (an outright refusal would have probably cost my job) was to find the value. What did they really want us to do? They wanted leadership on the floor, building relationships with their team, and making sure their team had what they needed. It was a servant leadership think. Now that is a requirement that adds value.

We built a system to have leadership talk to every employee once per quarter (instead of part number). We still checked tools, instructions, and machines, but our focus was on the people.

So what happened?

• I did zero audit prep.
• Our system still performed with less than half the industry’s typical number of findings.
• We consistently outperformed other divisions in our company.

The real proof was during an external IATF audit. This auditor was my first instructor. She was brilliant, experienced, and thorough. It was a normal audit for us, tough and fair. Ending with 3 minor nonconformances.

The very next week she went to audit another one of our divisions - our flagship division that management loved (they made the most money). Their audit was brutal. 2 major nonconformances and 10 minors.

Their system was in shambles.

Same auditor. Different systems. Different results.

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The Takeaway

Embedding quality into how you run the business works.

Not because it checks boxes, but because it aligns people, decisions, and systems.

This isn't for people who want an easy answer.

This is for people who want to take the extra step to make quality a central tenet of their organization.

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Reply with "SIMPLIFY" if you're ready to build a quality system that actually works.