9. Two Shades of Turquoise: Both In Spec, Both Rejected

And so our company has evolved pretty dramatically since we moved into our new facility.

And once things started getting back into their normal rhythm, our old gremlins reappeared and the original bottlenecks came back.

And we had two parts running inside the shop at the same time.

Both long-term jobs, both high volume.

And during that stretch, some things happened inside of our company that we didn't fully see until they exploded.

And after we did our root cause analysis, we decided we wanted to share what we found.

And so we're going to break this into two threads.

Thread one is on us, and thread two has nothing to do with us and everything to do with the print.

So let's start with part A.

So we're running this part in large batch quantities and thousands of parts a month.

And during this time, we had a serious shortage on the night shift on the quality control side of things.

And so we made a decision.

We took one of our most competent people from the day shift and we moved him to the night shift temporarily.

And his job was to do training, establish day shift level systems, and make sure everybody was following quality control procedures.

It was a legitimate move and it made total sense.

And then unexpectedly, our quality control manager had to go out on paternity leave about a month earlier than we had scheduled, which was great for him, but bad timing for the department.

So now we have our second best QC tech on at night, and our QC manager is out on leave, and the gaps in the department begin to surface that we had never really had visibility to before.

And that seemed to be a fairly stable department, and it turned out to be more fragile than what we had expected.

We moved the tech back to the day shift once the immediate need on nights was covered, but the underlying gaps didn't go away just because we reverted the schedule.

Then the quality manager months later left the company entirely.

So we promote internally, not the same person, but we elevated our lead CMM programmer to the quality manager seat, and he inherited all the department's problems mid-repair.

He walks into a mess that wasn't his making, and he has to figure out what's broken while also trying to run the department.

So what's actually going wrong? So if you don't have a strong root cause analysis system in your company, that is where I suggest that you start.

Because you are never going to figure out what went wrong if you're not very good at answering the five whys.

And when we got to the bottom of it, this is what we found.

And so our company has evolved pretty dramatically since we moved into our new facility.

And once things started getting back into their normal rhythm, our old gremlins reappeared and the original bottlenecks came back.

And we had two parts running inside the shop at the same time.

Both long-term jobs, both high volume.

And during that stretch, some things happened inside of our company that we didn't fully see until they exploded.

And after we did our root cause analysis, we decided we wanted to share what we found.

And so we're going to break this into two threads.

Thread one is on us, and thread two has nothing to do with us and everything to do with the print.

So let's start with part A.

So we're running this part in large batch quantities and thousands of parts a month.

And during this time, we had a serious shortage on the night shift on the quality control side of things.

And so we made a decision.

We took one of our most competent people from the day shift and we moved him to the night shift temporarily.

And his job was to do training, establish day shift level systems, and make sure everybody was following quality control procedures.

It was a legitimate move and it made total sense.

And then unexpectedly, our quality control manager had to go out on paternity leave about a month earlier than we had scheduled, which was great for him, but bad timing for the department.

So now we have our second best QC tech on at night, and our QC manager is out on leave, and the gaps in the department begin to surface that we had never really had visibility to before.

And that seemed to be a fairly stable department, and it turned out to be more fragile than what we had expected.

We moved the tech back to the day shift once the immediate need on nights was covered, but the underlying gaps didn't go away just because we reverted the schedule.

Then the quality manager months later left the company entirely.

So we promote internally, not the same person, but we elevated our lead CMM programmer to the quality manager seat, and he inherited all the department's problems mid-repair.

He walks into a mess that wasn't his making, and he has to figure out what's broken while also trying to run the department.

So what's actually going wrong? So if you don't have a strong root cause analysis system in your company, that is where I suggest that you start.

Because you are never going to figure out what went wrong if you're not very good at answering the five whys.

And when we got to the bottom of it, this is what we found.