I work for a smallish steel coating facility. Recently the head of operations received a promotion that put him over my boss as well as the entire quality department. Before that we were an independent department reporting to the VP of manufacturing, who oversaw all the engineers, maintenance, operations, and quality. My question is this: Is having operations oversee the quality dept. create a sort of "conflict of interest"? Several areas where we can be prodded to make decisions that favor prime yield instead of customer satisfaction come to mind. Thanks for any feedback.
muohio,
Your desire for independent reporting to the CEO may come from you thinking the people responsible for production cannot be trusted to be responsible for quality.
Better to remove the conflict between yield and customer satisfaction. Surely yield includes only those products that conform to customer requirements? Including items that will be returned by customers in the measurement of yield makes no sense to me.
Make sure that everyone in the organization understands that
the only way to reduce costs and increase yield is by managing quality. Short-term versus long-term thinking may be the problem here.
You cannot manage quality for them. Instead, become the champion of the CEO's organizational management system (process-based) that reinforces the required behaviors and helps everyone to get their work right the first time.
Then a wise CEO will invite you to be her or his trusted advisor.
John