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Our Quality Improvement initiatives must involve workmen.
I was recently working with a team which was struggling to control process variability on an important plant operation. The specifications were tight and the process output was showing higher variability. Their quality team and technical experts spent several days on the shop floor in vain as they continued to get out-of-spec material which had to be reprocessed.
I was casually chatting with the operator of that machine, who mentioned that the issue was with a standard operating procedure which mandated certain machine setting. He asked if he could experiment with overriding the SOP and try an alternate setting. It worked and the process variability came down significantly.
The lesson is simple. Operators who are working day in and day out on the machine often have the best ideas on quality improvement. The question is... do we involve them in our quality improvement efforts?
Companies who have institutionalized the concept of shop floor employee involvement have innumerable stories of improving quality while reducing cost simultaneously.