Caster said:
Wes
What a great result to hear about. Three cheers. I enjoy the Cove but overall I find it pretty negative. You restored my faith in Quality.
I too have had a "Change the World" experience in quality.
Would you care to share how you made this happen?
I am willing to bet that a passionate and visionary leader factored heavily in this success.
If you did this without management support, please, please tell us how.
Caster
What a great result to hear about. Three cheers. I enjoy the Cove but overall I find it pretty negative. You restored my faith in Quality.
I too have had a "Change the World" experience in quality.
Would you care to share how you made this happen?
I am willing to bet that a passionate and visionary leader factored heavily in this success.
If you did this without management support, please, please tell us how.
Caster
Somehow I missed this response by Caster. I apologize. It is a glitch of the software that polls keep popping up as "new" entries each time someone enters the poll, but not a new message. On busy days, I tend to skip over polls for that reason when an old poll comes to the top again.
The answer:
The scenario listed above was part of a multi-year program. Back in 1990, I was fretting during early retirement from my previous life as an investment banking executive.
An old acquaintance who had purchased a number of machine shops and consolidated them into one location called in a panic and begged for help. He was a tremendous salesman, but an incredibly lousy businessman who was in deep financial trouble - so deep, he had no idea how deep.
When I showed up for a visit, the place was in a shambles, dirty, with a messy underequipped office, creditors calling, etc. He literally begged me to "save him or shoot him to put him out of his misery."
I agreed, for a substantial piece of the action, to come out of retirement and turn the business around ("re-engineering" before the term got over-used and became a bad taste in everyone's mind.) We intended to groom the company for one or both of us to exit by selling off to the employees down the road via an ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan.)
I had free rein and lots of experience from my investment banking days in remaking a company to make a good impression on new investors. We had little cash and lots of debts, but I was creative and savvy in dealing with money and credit to get best value for my dollar.
We dumped all low profit business and concentrated only on high profit, high tech, niche markets. We dumped outmoded equipment and brought in new, high output computer-driven models. We cleaned up the place so it sparkled like a machinery showroom. Every single person we hired and every piece of equipment we bought or leased had to pay its way and generate a big ROI.
Every technique in Quality, business building, marketing, operations, "partnering" and outsourcing I could read or learn about was considered with a FMEA-type approach before adopting or implementing. Instead of seeking benchmarks to model our organization after, we resolved to BE THE BENCHMARK. We took to mistake proofing in a big way and literally thrilled prospects, suppliers, and customers when we shared our ideas with them.
We packaged product to exactly match production quantities for a single shift at a customer's plant to make his life easier in tracking inventory. We strove to have Quality achieve "direct to production" status, bypassing incoming inspection, resulting in lower soft costs for us and customer, offsetting any increase in "hard costs."
We engaged in lots of concurrent engineering with customers (an adjunct of Contract Review) which made us an integral part of the customer's team so we by-passed the "auction" process for business and entered into "negotiated" pricing instead. The soft costs saved by us and customer justified higher hard costs.
Always, always, I kept my eye on the bottom line, but realized we had to spend money to make money. We made sure we were the best paying account for all our suppliers and constantly kept our pool of suppliers "in the loop" about upcoming projects.
We did everything we could to be customer-centric and empowered everyone in our organization to deal with any and every customer, "owning" the situation until it was resolved. Even our janitor was empowered to answer the phone and access a customer's account on the computer to answer a question or to go out in the shop and turn the call over to the actual operator working on the customer's order. We empowered everyone because it made economic sense to do so, giving us a solid reputation as the "can do" folks who gave answers, not excuses.
Alas, my fellow stockholder and friend got a terminal disease and died. His disease was an exclusion in the key man insurance policy because of a family history. His heirs had no interest in selling off as a going business to an ESOP, which meant taking back a substantial amount of bonds from employees as payment, and I was forced to sell off accounts and the machines and personnel to run the accounts for ready cash.
Truth be told, as good as I was at running the machining business, I never really liked it. I only liked the "action" of perceiving and solving problems.
(knock on wood). A lot of other people are jumping ship as well. I don't know who's going to do the work when all of us expendible people are gone....but I'm sure that management will figure it out. 
