CAREER

CORNER

Get Around the Box by Joe Conklin

T
hinking outside the box can be group to add disclaimers and expla- paperwork, not realizing it was dupli-
crucial to business success. But nations to the report it would present cating work already being done by
career success sometimes de- at the departmental meeting. the inspectors. I found myself in an
pends on getting around the box— On one occasion, representatives of awkward position. My immediate
and here I’m referring to the boxes on the assembly group pointed out that a boss made it clear he wanted me to
the organization chart. continue what I was doing. After his
When appealing up the chain of discussions with manufacturing
command is not practical, opportuni- failed, action from higher up was
ties to address quality issues through There’s often more needed to resolve the dispute. For
lateral relationships might still exist. whatever reason, no such action was
My introduction to this principle than one way to solve taken, or at least I could find no sign
occurred early in my career at a com- of it.
pany making electronic controls. I was
a problem. One consequence of the manufac-
in the quality assurance (QA) engi- turing group’s decision to stop pro-
neering branch. viding test data was a large reduction
Manufacturing was divided be- particular issue would soon not count in one of the inputs to the weekly
tween two groups. One produced the as a defect because of an upcoming report: the results of electronic testing
circuit boards, and the other packaged engineering change. But corporate in the assembly area. The people per-
them into final units for testing and engineering refused to change the forming the tests worked for assem-
shipment. The product inspectors drawing, claiming it would be too bly. When QA engineering personnel
reported to the quality control branch. expensive. The assemblers argued began compiling data at the factory
They documented any findings about they should not be held accountable level, we provided a form for testers
a specific unit on the paperwork that when they were forced to use incor- to use to summarize their results.
followed it. rect drawings. With the end of cooperation, testers
The inspectors also marked up a rarely completed this form.
check sheet with data on the various How Much Justification?
types of defects they found. The check The QA engineering manager, my What Next?
sheet summarized what took place immediate boss, explained to the The lack of action up the chain of
during a shift and was eventually assembly group’s leadership that our command left me unsure of what to
consolidated to understand trends at allocation of time in the weekly meet- do next. Fortunately, the lack of test
the level of an individual manufactur- ing was not likely to be increased, so data from assembly did not prove
ing station. there was not enough opportunity in fatal.
that forum to go into the detailed level The cooperation from the circuit
Next Level of justification it was requesting. board group, combined with the
I was charged with taking the con- More important, the place where a information provided by the inspec-
solidation to the next level of generali- defect was noted did not necessarily tors working in the assembly group,
ty—the entire factory—and reporting indicate the people working there provided sufficient clues that ulti-
the overall yield and major defects were responsible. The cause could just mately raised the overall factory yield
weekly. as easily have occurred farther up the by about five percentage points.
I presented my report during a production stream. With a little more thought, perhaps I
meeting attended by representatives My group’s goal was to merely pro- would have pursued a solution to the
from all the major departments, such vide some high level indication of test data issue from a different direc-
as manufacturing, production control, where to focus problem solving tion. One eventually came at the ini-
engineering, quality and purchasing. efforts, not to affix blame. tiative of the test engineering
Groups within the manufacturing The manufacturing assembly group department.
department had differing opinions did not accept this explanation. A test engineer heard about the
about the factory level yield report. Although it could not stop the weekly concept of analyzing yield at the fac-
The printed circuit board group compilation and reporting of the tory level and consulted some of our
accepted its share of the overall data inspectors’ data, it stopped cooperat- data for history on certain problem
without much comment and used it to ing with the QA group as far as defect units. When several of the forms were
shape its quality improvement efforts. reduction efforts were concerned. missing, I explained the difficulties in
The representatives of the group getting the forms from the assembly
assembling the boards were con- Duplication of Work test area. Because his area was on bet-
cerned the data made them appear The assembly group started compil- ter terms with the assembly group
responsible for things that were not ing its own data and adding up the than mine was, he went to its man-
their fault. They asked the quality defects noted on the production agement and proposed a log system

58 I APRIL 2007 I www.asq.org

 Please
JOSEPH D. CONKLIN is a comment
mathematical statistician at
the U.S. Department of If you would like to comment
Energy in Washington, DC. on this article, please post your
for communicating its results to his He earned a master’s degree
remarks on the Quality Progress
department. in statistics from Virginia
After this log system was in place, Tech and is a senior member Discussion Board at www.asq.org,
the test engineer arranged to pass of ASQ. Conklin is also an or e-mail them to [email protected].
ASQ certified quality man-
along these results to me so they
ager, quality engineer, quality auditor and reliability
could be included in time for the engineer.
weekly overall yield report. This filled
in the last remaining piece of informa-
tion and added some validity to our
trend analysis.
Up to that point in my career, the
habit of waiting for all the issues to be
resolved up the chain of command
was so ingrained in me that this sim-
ple idea of obtaining support from
another department with a common
need had not occurred to me.
In an ideal world, upper manage-
ment might have insisted that the
assembly test area send me the data
directly, but sometimes the ideal thing
does not happen.
In my nearly 20 years in quality
since that experience, I have encoun-
tered similar roadblocks. When the
chain of command is a little slow or
unable to respond, I continue to ask
myself whether some other part of the
organization with the same need
could cooperate on a more lateral
solution to the problem.

Keep Your Supervisor Informed

I always make it a point to keep my
immediate supervisor informed
before trying this strategy. I can’t
recall ever being turned down. He or
she normally shares my frustration at
the delay.
A side benefit of this strategy is
what you can learn about the perspec-
tives and challenges of other parts of
the organization.
Admittedly, the results of this strat-
egy are not always optimal, but they
can be good enough to stimulate
upper management to provide the
support needed to deal with a prob-
lem.
This strategy is an example of the
general principle of coming up with
more than one way to solve a prob-
lem. Following this principle helps to
separate the good quality profession-
als from the great ones.
Visit us at booth #411 at the ASQ World Conference on Quality and Improvement

QUALITY PROGRESS I APRIL 2007 I 59