ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most interesting and challenging stage of a quality control investigation is at the very beginning. It is very unusual for an SPC professional to be presented with neat, chronologically recorded, lot data. And, indeed, it is rather unusual for an SPC program to begin as a well thought-out management decision. Much more common is the situation where the quality consultant is called in “to put out fires.” In the United States, these fires may very well be the result of a litigation concerning a real or perceived defect in a production item. It will do no one much good to respond to a potential client whose business is collapsing by offering to implement an orderly program of statistical process control on a production network which is devoid of measuring sensors, which might not even have been charted. A fatal flaw for any consultant is to insist on dealing with the world as he would like to see it rather than as it is. We are accustomed, in both Poland and the United States, to receiving a call for implementing a “comprehensive program of quality control” quickly followed by a statement of the sort “By the way, we have some little problem on which you might care to help.” The “little problem” may be a lawsuit or a cancellation by a major client. A situation where the “problem” is actually a business effect rather than the technological cause of the effect requires a certain amount of exploratory work, perhaps to the point of modeling the process which produced the real or perceived defect.
