Re: As expected!
Originally posted by Randy Stewart
What it boiled down to was that the approval authority is the bottleneck. It can take up to 2 weeks to get a PO approved. If we wait on this process to complete we will be late in the delivery to the customer. So the same people saying that personnel can lose their jobs are the people causing the problem.
Supplier QA. Randy’s post jogged my memory regarding the approval process for Suppliers at a large Aircraft Company that I spent a year with before the boom was lowered. I went there with 19 years Navy Submarine experience as a Senior QA Engineer to assist this company with a Navy contract they had for an Electrolytic Chlorine Generator. (1.2 Mil per copy). My interpretation of the NAVSEA contract varied significantly from what the Supplier QA people thought. They fought it every step of the way. Talk about bottlenecks. Try Jugheads. They were so entrenched with the way they did things, that we bogged down significantly while they determined that a Supplier was qualified to fabricate materials for the Navy. Many of theses suppliers were already shipping material to Prime Contractors who had Navy Contracts. But, no, we had to do it their perceived way.
Anyway, through no fault of anybody (I think), the Navy either decided to cancel the program or have it manufactured elsewhere. That coupled with a dramatic decrease in their regular business, there was a massive layoff. The entire Supplier QA department in this division, including myself, joined the first wave of 400 employees in the ranks of the unemployed. Not for nothing, but the hours that followed the announcement burned into my memory. There was crying and sobbing and wailing and hugging going on all around me. My thoughts were, at the time, look at these pompous, arrogant, smug people, reduced to whimpering creatures, now. These “roadblocks” to the process were no more. Along with the process. The layoffs continued for years, eliminating some 6,000 positions. I often wonder where everybody went and did they learn anything from realizing that you are just a number and that what you do isn’t about you, or what you think. This little story has very little to do with anything except to say that qualifying a Supplier shouldn’t be a power trip for those assigned the responsibility to do so. Because, you may be doing something else tomorrow.
