UPSIDE DOWN EXCELLENCE

Quality that's simple

Hey Reader

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So this past week I needed to justify why we have to inspect parts. (This is obvious right? Apparently not.)

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My initial thought was to go to ISO 9001 8.6 and throw the book at them. And in my early years as a quality manager, that is exactly what I would’ve done. Quote the clause and say you need to do this.

But then I wondered what is that going to get me?

What will they learn?

And what will that do to the company culture?

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Was this email forwarded to you?

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If I throw the ISO standard at them, in the best case, I get compliance. I get people doing something because they have to do it. They don’t understand the why and the requirement stays an external requirement, easily forgotten when needed. They don’t embody the requirements in their process.

So why do we inspect parts? How do we convince our team this is required?

I came up with two reasons:

1. Personal pride. I take pride in my work and I want to make sure that I’m doing it right. I don’t want to pass garbage to the next person.
2. The Customer. I want to make sure that the customer gets good parts because I don't want parts returned or rejected. As an employee of the company, I want to make sure our customers are satisfied.

In my case, the team takes great pride in their work. That part resonated with the entire team. They had other reasons why they weren’t recording inspection data. Sometimes the forms were available, and sometimes they were cutting corners (the honesty was very appreciated).

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What's the takeaway?

As quality professionals, it’s our job to understand the objections to following requirements and help make doing the right thing, the easy thing. We build processes to ensure compliance, but compliance must be the easy process. If measuring parts takes an hour and someone has to walk to every corner of the shop, you can bet that process will get skipped now and again.

One special note about processes - don’t forget processes are run by humans. At some point, even the most automated process requires human interaction. Build the processes around the human (we’ll explore that topic in a future newsletter)

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ISO Series

I’d like to start a newsletter series on the various parts of the iso 9001 standard. And for good measure, I’ll throw in a handful of IATF 16949 clauses too. My goal is to review the clause, understand the why behind it, and then share a story or two of what I did or how I did it. Like I did above about 8.6 Release of products and services.

Sound good?

If this is interesting to you, could you do 2 things:

1. reply back with “ISO” to let me know you’re interested.
2. forward this email to someone who could benefit from this, a customer, supplier, coworker or friend. Anyone you think will get value out of this newsletter.