There are several issues about the Six Sigma approach to quality that bother me. First, Six Sigma is a performance standard that hardly anyone can understand. Secondly, it’s an engineering approach to quality management. It’s more of a defect-management program than it is defect-prevention. However, what bothers me most is that it doesn’t give front-line employees the opportunity to participate in eliminating defects in their work.

Back in the early 1960s, there was a quality revolution underway. It was called zero defects (ZD) and everybody was doing it.  The idea behind ZD was (and still is) to set a performance standard that no defects are acceptable; a standard that everyone could understand. Backed by the Department of Defense and all the military services, ZD was an enormous success. It soon spread to suppliers of major companies and companies outside of defense. Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler, all had a ZD program. However, some companies soon found interest waning in their program. The problem wasn’t with the zero defects concept or techniques, it was that employees doing the work didn’t have a say in what was going on. Being only preached to about quality improvement and not having a say in how to improve quality, they soon lost interest. Regardless of the posters, pins, and platitudes, they still had to do the same old job with the same old methods and tools.

General Electric was an early supporter of ZD. One division bused all their employees to the Boston Gardens to kick off the ZD program. I’m sure the employees were impressed and recognized the company’s commitment to quality work. Soon however, like most ZD programs, they soon found that employees were losing interest. Someone at General Electric came up with a bright idea: Ask the worker what’s causing defects, and then fix the problem. It was called error cause removal (ECR). ECR worked wonders then and could do the same today. It’s cheap and easy to conduct an ECR program—no training, no new equipment, no new staff. Everything you need is there now, waiting for you. It is necessary to create a simple form for the employee to describe their problem, and some simple advertising material, but that’s about all.

When ECR came on the scene, many companies wanted to do things their own way, so some programs had different names: cause and removal of errors, error cause identification, and so forth. Regardless of the name, the technique is the same: Ask the employee, “What prevents you from doing your job right every time?” Their answer is the error-cause, and it must be removed. It’s simple.

The word “program” probably isn't the right word to use for ECR. A good ECR effort works best as a campaign rather than a program. Because it’s almost impossible to maintain interest 365 days a year in anything, it’s a good idea to conduct your ECR campaign every year. Run it for 30 days—six weeks or so—and then put it away until next year.

Running an ECR campaign is easy, but there are a few rules you must follow. Rule No. 1 is “Never let an ECR get lost.” Rule No. 2 is “Make it easy.” There are a couple of ways to collect the completed ECR forms. They can be put in a suggestion-type box and picked up regularly, logged in, and routed to the direct supervisor of the employee submitting the problem for action. Of course, each ECR must be followed up to see that the action was taken. An ECR campaign is like a ball of string: It’s easy to wind up, but drop it and you’ve got a big problem. Another way to handle an ECR is to let the employees hand it to their supervisor. The problem with this method is that the supervisor may let it get lost and then you have real trouble.

The first step in setting up your ECR campaign is management and supervision training. First-line supervisors must be 100-percent behind the idea and recognize that it will help their operation.

It’s absolutely necessary to conduct some kind of promotion—advertising—to spark interest in the ECR idea. It doesn’t have to be anything elaborate, just a few posters and a few table tents, which you can do on your computer. You might want to buy some advertising gimmicks—pens, key rings, etc. Microsoft’s Publisher program has a preset format for table tents. There’s also a lot of free artwork available on the internet—cartoons, line drawings, and photographs—to help you make your point.

You could create an effective publicity program using PowerPoint. Make posters out of the slides you used to brief management. If you want something classier, most printers can enlarge your work to a full-size poster. I recently had a book cover enlarged to 20 inches x 30 inches for $12.00 at Staples. They mounted it on foam core and covered it with a protective plastic. It made a nice display at the book store.
 
You should have a theme for the program that ties in with what you do. One glass plant came up with a character called “Les Cullet.” Cullet is what they call scrap in the glass business so Les Cullet was the bad guy. Clever. Another company used BIPs for built-in problems. They created a simple cartoon character that looked something like a potato with legs, and called it the BIP. The theme was “Get the BIP!” “Are there BIPs in your job?” The BIP was the bad guy. It’s OK to have a little fun at work.

I created a program that used a cartoon bug. The bug was an evil-looking creature, so nobody would feel sorry for it. I had cartoons of The Bug getting into everything. He was in the computer, in the file cabinet, tangled in the phone cord. I had bugs doing everything. The theme was, “Get the bugs out of your job.” It was a huge success and employees loved it. We spent a couple of dollars on key chains and coffee mugs, but not much. A few dollars spent on “I Got The Bug” badges paid off big.

To show you the idea, here are a few pictures of my bug. These bugs, however, are copyrighted by me, so copy the idea, not the artwork.

You must also keep in mind that an ECR campaign isn’t a suggestion program. Most problems can be corrected by the first-line supervisor. Most suggestion programs send ideas to a committee, which tries to figure out how to reject them. Most of the ECRs will result in a change that will prevent defects.

I’ve never heard of an ECR program that really failed. I know of a few that just dwindled away because of lack of attention, but with very little effort, a successful ECR program will mean profit and morale improvement for your organization. History shows that you will receive about 2.5 ECRs per employee. Most problems reported are real, so there’s real quality and profit improvement.

Don’t forget to write a report about how successful your ECR program was, and hand out a few complements to workers and supervisors who made you a success.