Corrective Action - Increased Manufacturing Involvement - Injection moulding company

[Nette]

Hi

I work for an injection moulding company that manufactures plastic parts for the automotive industry.

We are currently looking at how we deal with corrective actions and at present the quality department deals with them with very minimal support from manufacturing.

Our senior management have decided that they want to change this and place more emphasis on manufacturing doing the investigations and implementation of corrective actions with the quality department providing a supporting role to them.

We have tried this before and failed.

Has anyone got any suggestions on how we can successfully get manufacturing to take ownership of corrective actions? Any advice or ideas would be welcolme.

Thank you.
Nette

 

[Howard Atkins]

If top management want it then they should help implement it to ensure it's success.
How are you operating at the moment, relating to each problem or making a monthy paretto of problems?

Have a monthly meeting with quality and production and a representative of senior management. Present the data and then perform root cause analysis on 2 or 3 issues. Help them to find the solution, then help them to implement this, monitor their efforts and each month present their accomplishments.
This is standard stuff but if you show that the root cause is theirs then they will have to fix it.

Good luck

 

[Nette]

Thanks for your reply.

At the moment customer concerns come through to the quality department. We then organise containment action, carryout the root cause analysis, decide what actions to take, implement the actions, verify they work and respond to the customer. We basically have to hound manufacturing to help us.

The desire for change has come from the Senior Management and they want to change it so the quality department gets notification of the concern and organises containment action. Manufacturing then carryout the root cause analysis, decide what actions to take and implement the actions. They then feed it back to quality who will verify the actions and respond to the customer.

Our timings for response is 24 hours containment, 7 days root cause and 14 days actions and verification.

We have tried to do this before but manufacturing don't investigate or implement any actions and we end up doing it at the last minute.

How do we get manufacturing to do the investigation and actions?

Nette

 

[Howard Atkins]

You seem to be banging your head against the wall.
You are also only refering to complaints,. what is your internal reject rate? Are you dealing with this?
As usual Quality is in the middle. IMO You will have to use the big stick of management
It seems to me like a motivation issue, you are doing it cause you care, manyfacturing are to busy making non compliant parts.
Sorry that I cannot be more positive or helpfull.

 

[Cari Spears]

We have tried to do this before but manufacturing don't investigate or implement any actions and we end up doing it at the last minute.

How do we get manufacturing to do the investigation and actions?

I don't believe the quality department can...

Our senior management have decided that they want to change this and place more emphasis on manufacturing doing the investigations and implementation of corrective actions with the quality department providing a supporting role to them.

Only senior management (their bosses) can.

That doesn't mean that you can't contribute/help/educate - but the bottom line is they aren't going to do anything if the quality department enables them by "doing it at the last minute" for them and as long as their bosses don't make them.

 

[fuzzy]

Piggyback on what works...

We have been going through similar changes and I think we may have gotten onto something this time. My top manager wants to make Operations report on internal NC material in place of the previous Qual / Eng. reporting. So we are basically adapting our existing methods from our Safety program in terms of response times, problem solving, and report formatting. Safety is our #1 priority and Quality is # 2 so why wouldn't we commit as much to Quality as we do to Safety in the Operations segment? Can you hook a ride on a program that you do well with? As has been mentioned, having support from Top Management goes a long way towards changing a culture. Does your management have the will to overcome resistance to change; the discipline to sustain this initiative beyond one month? I hope to say yes in my own case, but I believe a better measure will be after six months. Good luck to you!

 

[jrubio]

It is dificoult but

Hi friends.

To compete in the Automobile sector is High priority to produce parts with High Quallity (-> 0 ppm), the Automotive industry is cruel with that point, and at the end due to charge back process it cost a lot of money to the Supplier..

And what is more important american companies such as Ford and GM are having a lot of problems with that point Quality, and now they are having the great challage to minimize the inbound source of no-quality and compete with Toyota.

The use the arms of Charge back process and the rating for each concern and Purshasing supervision to get out of bussiness the bad supplier.

I have seen projects which BMW had, in a one Big3 american company wich went out of business due to a tier 2 supplier, they can not afford to have these suppliers.

One manager told me, it is time that we call for 0 pppm products due to the huge inbound of components we receive, this is a nightmare, we have to stop it.

Therefore you have to tell your Management that if they do not involved production in this improment circles, your enterprice, sure enough will be not enough time in the Automobile Arena....

 

[Jen Kirley]

I sense some separation of responsibility, authority and powers at play here.

My impression is that Manufacturing has little active influence in the correctove action process, but plays a support and advisory role. If that is not how it is supposed to be, then perhaps this group has taken a hands-off position because history has shown your group will pick the thing up in the end and run with it.

So, top management has said "We will do better" but have they clearly described how they will support this endeavor? Have they talked about what improvement would look like and how the management would ensure that the improvement felt like everyone's victory?

I sense a separation of the three entities, much like our system of government (executive, judicial and legislative branches) but should a manufacturing entity be able to enjoy the same boundaries? To put it more plainly I ask:

What does the director of manufacturing say to support this effort? Does the action match the speech?

What does top management say it will do to take final ownership of the concerns--is there a process where unanswered or unresolved corrective actions will be systematically advanced to the next higher level until an acceptable resolution is achieved--or do they remain outside of the accountability loop?

Lastly I will ask a psychological question: How do you feel? How do the manufacturing folks feel about the quality effort--do they feel policed or are they normally and recognizably empowered to influence the positive? If they do not feel they can normally and recognizably influence the positive, arguably Quality will remain a police function.

If culture is an issue, changing it can be difficult and can take a long time. Progress is measured incrementally and gradually.

There are scores of books on the subject but I'll start you with Sirota et.al.: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/1188.cfm

...employees want a sense of achievement from work. The key element is to be proud of what you do and proud of the organization for which you are doing it. People don't want to work for an organization that's run by a bunch of crooks. The third element is camaraderie. This is also not mentioned much in our field, but it's key -- not only in the sense of having a friend, but working well together as a team. That is a tremendous source of satisfaction for people.

 

[Nette]

Thank you for all your replies.

The problem we have is that there is a battle between quality and sales. Sales is winning with manufacturing focusing on getting parts out of the door rather than quality.

I have had several discussions with our senior management and one of the problems we have identified is that when faced with the 8D document manufacturing think this is too complicated so I am not going to fill it in.

With this in mind we are going to design a more user friendly document for them to use that will still give us all the information we need to transfer onto the customer 8D. In addtion we are going to implement an escalation process so senior management can get involved if the concerns are being ignored. We are also going to give them a "idiots" guide to problem solving so they have clear steps to take when investigating concerns.

Basically we have to re-educate people and get them to accept that there is no point getting the parts out of the door if they are going to come back because they do not meet the customer requirements.

Should be fun!

Nette