ABSTRACT
At a staff meeting of an assembly plant, the quality assurance manager brought to the attention of the three foremen that the defect rate of products was creeping up in the past 8 weeks. His purpose was to solicit input as to what the solution might be. He asked the foremen, “How do you think we can correct this problem?” Without any further thought, all the foremen responded with the same suggestion, “We need to do more training to make sure the employees know how to do the job.” The quality assurance manager did not stop there. He continued to question how long those employees had been on the job, what training they already received, and if anything had changed in the operations of the department. As he probed deeper, he discovered that the increased percentage of rejection was due to the machinery not having been properly serviced as per maintenance contract with an outside vendor. That vendor had gone out of business. Consequently, the machinery was not functioning as designed, yielding products of inferior quality. Obviously, it was not due to poor performance or lack of training on the part of the employees on the assembly line. Soon afterwards the plant manager identified a new vendor to take over the maintenance contract and the defect rate dropped back to within the acceptable range.
