Future posts on this blog will focus on the business of customer satisfaction — how to track it, how to manage it, how to improve it — and on supplier management.

And oh, yeah, anything else I think about.

I shall be maintaining a separate blog about my life in New York, as we move around the greatest city in the world., but I’ll also work on the quality of this blog!

It has got me wondering, though, about the quality process and how it could be applied to the job search. If you start with the concept of quality planning, an FMEA approach to identifying the skills you are marketing, the locales you wish to target, the types of jobs you would like…this could (with some tweaking of the RPN methodology) help you focus on the most important areas for your job search.

And then there’s document control. Your resumes and cover letters can get confusing, especially if you keep updating the documents. Knowing the content of each document, and keeping track of to whom you have submitted these documents, is as tricky as any controlled distribution situation.

The product quality is also measured in similar ways. Spelling or grammatical errors in a resume or cover letter can keep the consumer (potential employer) from sampling the product (YOU).

Finally, there’s a customer satisfaction measurement process, in which the thank you letter and interview feedback mechanism can keep you in touch with the customer.

Maybe I ought to write this up…I should certainly take another look at my own product!

Time to look for another job.

This time, my employer has announced that this facility will either be sold or closed. If a buyer hasn’t come forth by the end of this year, I will be let go at the start of next year (you don’t really need a strategic level quality guy for a plant that is doing no strategic quality stuff!).

The other difference this time, though, is that I will be trying to stay close to our current location, as my wife will soon start a new (dream) job in Manhattan. She has moved so often for me, I think it’s time I adjust for her!

So—got any good recommendations?

My friend Brian used to talk about a fellow he had worked with early in his career. This process engineer boasted of having 12 years of experience. Brian finally determined that the man had one year of experience repeated 12 times!

Lately, I’ve been closely studying a facility where the average longevity for the managerial team is 28 years (with the same company!). The majority of the senior engineers have been in the company for over 20 years, as well. And most of the process equipment in the facility is well over 15 tears old.

To say that these folks are pretty much in a rut is too obvious. They’ve been doing the same job the same way for many years, with only the name on the logo changing. Not surprisingly, they also are suspicious of change.

Most of these folks have never worked for another company. They’ve never, in some cases, worked for a different boss! Many of their organizational memes are locked in fairly solidly.

They really are trying to get better. They’ve launched a Six Sigma initiative, and have sent the operations folks to visit best-in-class facilities. This has brought back some fresh approaches to production planning, but the old relationships still drive day-to-day interactions. And as the organization goes through some tough times, it’s the younger engineers, the ones who see that rigidity is keeping the body of the company from being flexible, who are looking for opportunities in other companies.

To which I would say, “Hogwash!”

A dictum of continuous improvement is that “if you’re not measuring it, you can’t improve it.”  We may not always want to know what the data show, but we certainly can’t make informed decisions based on what “everybody knows.”

Kinda scary, the way some people get to be quality directors…

Some of the lessons I’ve learned about auditing over the years include:

1. Try to anticipate the auditors’ questions. If neing audited to the ISO/TS standard, understand the questions implicit in the clause being audited. If it’s to the VDA standard, or something similar, the questions are spelled out.  Plan your explanation of what you do to meet the standard in such a way that your presentation of the facts follows the logic of the questions.
2. Have all of the relevant information readily at hand. If you’re using a database, have the screen up and running before you start. If you have processes or procedures to reference, have them open or readily available.
3. Plan the information. As much as possible, you want to be in control of the audit, so know ahead of time what you’re planning to show, and make sure you inderstand the information completely.
4. Don’t raise more questions than you answer. If, in showing information, you have holes in the data or if the data shows unexpected results, be prepared to address the results before the auditor can question it!
5. Run through your part of the audit with your internal team several days ahead of time, so that they can spot holes or concerns.

I like to see audits flow in a basic pattern:

1. Describe the process or activity — flow charts work well
2. If the process results in a metric of some kind, show the trend for the metric, and what your action plans are to address negative trends or points.
3. Have evidence ready for actions, records, etc.
4. Show how you are continually improving your activity.

We have another VDA audit next week…I’ll let you know how it goes!

Since the last time I posted, however, my life in quality has been busy. The facility in which I work is seeking to obtain certification to build products for the automotive market.  Having been registered to ISO 9000 for several years, the plant originally thought it wouldn’t be too difficult to slip over to the ISO 16949 automotive standard.

Silly company.

In addition to the ISO 16949, we also have to meet the German automotive standard, VDA 6.3. The difference is that third parties audit and cerrtify a company to the ISO standard–and you pay them to do so. But the VDA standard is used by the automotive customers themselves when they audit.

So in April we had our first VDA audit, and did better than we might have done, but were really raked over the coals. We followed that with our first official ISO 16949 audit, and did very well, thank you. Two weeks later, a major American supplier to the car companies spent a couple of days with us using their own checklist, and left happy, as well.

So my three month sabbatical hasn’t been wasted. I’ll try to get back to more timely interjections.

Yesterday we started talking about problem solving. You may remember that I insisted that the first step in solving a problem was to correctly define the problem. In my example, it was 10:00 AM and I was hungry. I also showed that understanding the problem could go a long way to understanding root cause for that problem. In this case, using the “Five Whys” methodology, we were able to determine that the reason I was hungry was that my failure to properly set my alarm clock the night before had led me to oversleep.

It really can not be overemphasized: In order to solve a problem, you must first truly define the problem, and then drive to learn the root cause.

It really can not be overemphasized: In order to solve a problem, you must first truly define the problem, and then drive to learn the root cause.  Well, okay, maybe there can be too much of a good thing. But once you have a solid understanding of root cause, you can go about the process of corrective action.

Note the word “corrective.” That implies that the action you take will be sufficient to prevent recurrence of the problem in the future; at the least, your corrective action should address the cause of the problem and provide ways to mitigate or diminish the effect if the root cause can not be totally eradicated.

It is often the case that there can be more than one potential corrective action suggested. In our example, we determined that the root cause for my hunger problem was failure to properly reset my alarm clock after the weekend. This could lead to more than one potential corrective action: