Hello..
First time in this forum
. Very informative blog
.
I have worked for 5 years in aircraft manufacturing company, now further my study, full time student. Although my previous company is accredated to AS9100, ISO and NADCAP, but we do not have formally implementing any TQM tools. The company provide high quality products, and have good systems and documentation. We have gain few medals from the customers. But sadly to acheive the high quality product we scraped nearly half of the parts in first year of production. This being re-occur to the next projects, again and again. Sometimes we have more than 5 times FAIs for the same type of machining process.
Quality system is to make things in control and for others to have confidents in us. Customer just want to have high quality, safety and usable products. They do not want to know how much we lost or how hard we work to produce the product. TQM is for our own company's sake. To do things right. This is where TQM appears, Quality is profit not expenses.
Managements always have doubt in implementing TQM. They think training is cost and waste production time, (although they not declare it, but its the actual senario in most of the company). For them on job training is enough, learned while you are working, learned from experiences. They know about TQM but they have no time to implement or call outsiders to teach the workers. They just keep the knowledge to themselves, just for the sake of answering auditors and customers. For scraps and non-conformance, they just blame the workers for not being responsible enough in their work.
Alin