Flying Blind: What Your Quality Data Miss Every Shift

Critical process information is often communicated by voice... and that isn’t being captured

A sound that’s slightly off before a bearing fails. A smell that shows up before a chemical reaction runs hot. A texture that feels wrong before any instrument confirms it. Frontline workers pick up on signals like these constantly and, most of the time, nothing in the plant is built to capture what they notice.

Take a line worker at a food manufacturing plant who notices something off about a batch running through her station. The texture is slightly different. The timing between steps feels a beat too fast. She can’t point to a specific number that’s wrong, but something in her gut says pay attention. She means to flag it at shift change, but the handoff that day runs long with everyone talking at once, and by the time she clocks out, she’s forgotten to tell her supervisor. Three days later, that same deviation shows up in finished product testing. The batch fails, production stops while the line is placed on hold, and a quality team is now working backward through a chain of events that started with a hunch nobody wrote down.

…

Want to continue?

By logging in you agree to receive communication from Quality Digest. Privacy Policy.

Create a FREE account

Forgot My Password

Comments

Excellent topic!

This information is very timely; thanks for bringing it up.

Of course, the intel from frontline workers will only help if managers can act on it. When I was going through my Navy Total Quality Leadership training, we had a lengthy classroom discussion about employee suggestions. Suggestion boxes were normally placed outside of many Commanding Officers' offices. We heard stories (and sometimes experienced these ourselves) of boxes that were solid wood throughout with a slot milled in the top to look like a suggestion box, of boxes that had no bottom, but had a waste paper basket or shredder placed underneath to catch the suggestions. We were asked why no one ever put in suggestions...that always brought a good laugh.

Then they asked, "Does anyone know how many suggestions Toyota gets every year?" Of course none of the students knew. "The answer: one million, five thousand, on average." This was an astounding number.

"Why? Because they implement 95% of them!"

At the time, of course, we had no idea about things like QFD or Hoshin Planning. We hadn't yet learned about TPS, or employee empowerment.

Imagine the incorporating the type of intel discussed in this article into a QFD system...

By the way, for a real-life example of management NOT paying attention to (rather, willfully ignoring) intel from the front lines, I highly recommend Netflix's documentary Downfall: The Case Against Boeing. It will make you want to book your next flight on an Airbus.