Re: Randy Berger My Answer to You About Nance

Posted by Mr.Pushbutton  On 2010/2/8 22:51:50

Brian, you bring up an interesting situation with Chrysler/Iacocca and Crosby. I read his book, the company I worked for in the early 80s handed them out to the employees. I actually read it, and agreed with much of what he said. Unfortunately quality and zero defects is something Amerian management likes the idea of, unitl it costs money or slows down the line, which no one can stand for. Your comments about Chrysler needing (then) a complete management change-out if they intended on living this is absolutely true. There is a real "slam it together" culture in Chrysler plants, Walt made his name in the auto industry taking Buick from a carriage shop to a production powerhouse, he was doing this while Henry Ford was still trying to find gentile bankers to loan money to him, and much of the Ford Highland park's production organization was pioneered by Walt, and many others, it was just taken to a scale unheard of before by Ford.
Crosby asserts that they guys on the floor assembing your product know good from bad, they know when parts don't work together and managers have to listen to this. There's a big problem there, obviously.
In the end, it pretty much resulted in some nice banners being made and hung in our shop, and that's about all, anything that constituted real quality just took more time than the company wanted to commit to, designs that would have to be reworked (time=money, always).
When I called on plants where our equipment was installed I noticed that GM plants had lots of "right way, wrong way" posters with very clear line drawings of how a main cap should be installed on an engine.
Ford had, at that time (early 90s) the most impressive set-up. They took SPC very seriously. One location We had an installation at was the plant in Belleview MI that manufactured alternators, it went Visteon and I think is closed now. They had a line where the alternators came together, there were 19 steps in a circular line, beginning with pressing bearings into machined housings, and on down the line until the finished product was stacked on pallets at the next station at the end of the line. off to the side was the QC station for that line, a QC inspector was metering samples, measuring shaft end play, running alernators on a test stand to measure and record their output, and so on. The had histrograms of their faults,
and were "walking the walk". The thing I was most impressed to learn there was that the QC guy was one of the workes from that line--that day. On a 19 man line they had 20 employees assigned. Every 20th day YOU became the QC guy, they all did QC in rotation. This ended the "them vs us" mentality, and gave each employee a hand in the process, the problems and the solutions.
Chrysler had some nice machines, but a lot of it was dog and pony show.