This is a series of blog posts digging deeper into the seven keys to building a quality culture, which builds on Nicole Parker’s introduction blog. In this article, we will discuss the fourth of these seven keys; Firefighting.
How Do We Address Firefighting Problems in Business?
In manufacturing, firefighting a problem is usually a symptom of:
- Poor or incomplete product or manufacturing process design–or lack of monitoring of those processes.
- The appropriate people are not taking a disciplined approach to utilizing quality tools.
- The lack of employees’ awareness of behaviors that can allow them to reduce quality issues. The opposite may also be true, they may not understand what behaviors increase the likelihood of quality issues.
Let’s look at the impact of firefighting on an organization:
- Extremely expensive – By the nature of calling it firefighting, it is a response to an unexpected emergency, which takes people away from productive work and erodes the business’ margins. This is a double hit for an organization. Not only does the firefighter need to direct their time toward the fire, but that is lost opportunity time. Remember, there is also the “rule of ten”, with every level of completion of an assembly the cost to address a defect increases tenfold.
- Builds a weak culture – In a future blog we will discuss hero syndrome. This is a behavior that leads to continually “fixing” specific instances or problems without addressing the root cause and eliminating the problem. This is the exact opposite of what you want in a business culture. The stars are the ones who not only address the specific instance, but also seek to eliminate any recurrence. The silent stars are those who prevent the problems from ever occurring. Reward the behaviors of the real stars, not the firefighters.
- Opens up an opportunity – The silver lining when witnessing firefighting is the indication that there is a problem likely due to a symptom of a core problem as mentioned above. Firefighting is evident when we see repeat issues, the root cause was either not found, not treated adequately, or the treatment didn’t carry over to a similar part. Furthermore, steps need to be taken to ensure future products are designed to eliminate that problem.
Design Quality from the Start
If we don’t first involve the right cross-functional team of people in the design phases, quality risks and their associated costs dramatically increase.
- Design for extreme prevention – use a cross functional team to design out all failures (failures in processing, procurement, assembly, maintainability, serviceability, sustainability, etc.)
- Leverage knowledge from the past – use systems that allow the institutionalization of failure prevents and lessons learned that can be leveraged by everyone
- Manage the new product introduction (NPI) process – develop project templates to help drive NPI processes to reduce the risks to the timing or quality of the launch
- Incorporate the supply chain – take care when selecting suppliers and do so not on cost alone, consider quality, delivery, expertise, lead-time, etc. Then once they are on board, bring them into your ecosystem, collaborate, share design information, changes and make sure they understand your requirements, especially those that are critical to quality and safety.
Disciplined Use of Quality Improvement Tools
We can have great people, but if they don’t employ the use of tools, their effectiveness will be decreased. There are preventive tools to stop problems from happening in the first place and reactive tools to deal with the reality that problems will arise, but will increase the chances of eliminating a repeat of the problem in the future.
Preventive Tools
- Lessons Learned Library – Build libraries of knowledge for Design FMEA, Process FMEA, to the lessons from prior part corrective actions. Teach people to use those libraries when developing similar products or addressing similar problems.
- NPI Project Templates – As mentioned above, evolve NPI project templates as things are learned from active projects so the next project improves the process and reduces risk.
- Design Risk Mitigation – Develop foundation and family design risk libraries so common failures and their mitigation actions are leverageable during design of products.
- Sourcing – One can only be as strong as their weakest supplier so supplier selection is critical, have an RFQ process that weighs all aspects of the suppliers responsibilities, not just cost.
- Process Risk Mitigation – Develop foundation and family process risk libraries so common failures and their mitigation actions are leverageable during the design of the manufacturing processes.
Reactive Tools for When Things Go Bad
- Use cross-functional teams of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to get the best people working on eradication.
- An accurate, defined and agreed upon problem statement.
- Use of root cause tools (5 why, ishikawa/fishbone, etc). Do not consider corrective actions until the team is convinced the true root cause has been identified.
- Use a seasoned facilitator of effective root cause analysis.
- Identify actions that can eliminate the cause. If that cannot be done, look for actions to minimize the occurrence of the cause.
- Think beyond the current situation.
- Systemic perspective – determine if there is a systemic cause and if so, this problem will likely affect other parts. Consider applying corrective actions to other affected part numbers (e.g. foundational for family FMEA updates).
- Lessons learned – document the lessons the team learned during the CAPA process so it can be shared for future personnel or new products.
- Continuous Improvement – consider using continuous improvement projects to manage improvements.
- SCARs – if NCRs are due to suppliers, issue SCARs and hold suppliers accountable to eliminate the problem. Consider having the supplier compensate for costs of their quality through chargebacks.
Whole Company Awareness
This is the heart of a quality culture. Every employee and I mean every employee needs to understand how awareness and behaviors in their areas of responsibility increase or decrease the quality experience for our customers.
Preventive Awareness
- New Product Introduction (NPI)
- Assess the feasibility of the organization’s ability to take on this NPI – can we be set up to succeed?
- Plan backwards from the start of production (SOP) so we know what it will take to meet timing without sacrificing the quality objectives
- Design quality into the part with a cross-functional team
- Pre-production Material Planning – consider the following:
- Sourcing selection
- Potential disruptions
- Geo-political concerns
- Supplier Management
- Monitor the performance of key suppliers
- Collaborate with suppliers especially around change management
- Audits
- Focus audits on high risk areas
- Use layered process audits to drive awareness and differing perspectives on the daily operations
- Human Factors
- Reduce variability through automation where human variability is too great
- Documentation and training should be provided to ensure people have the knowledge of the best practices and adjust them when there is a better way
- Asset Management
- Select equipment that can provide the accuracy and precision required and then maintain the equipment
- Gauging must be capable of accurately measuring the tolerances required, evaluate its capability to studies and keep them calibrated
Reactive Awareness
- Non-conformances
- Contain all suspect products
- Determine how to disposition the defective product based on cost and timing needs
- Identify process characteristics that can help identify when the process is approaching thresholds of producing non-conforming parts as opposed to measuring the parts for conformance…once the part is produced, it is too late.
- Corrective Actions
- Choose wisely, not every non-conformance needs to be a corrective action – use a risk based approach to choose need corrective action
- The root cause facilitator must be qualified in root cause analysis and the common tools (5 why, Ishikawa, etc.) – they determine the course the team takes to get to their final root cause
Reduce Firefighting to Build a Quality Culture
If we want to reduce firefighting, we must not reward it. Instead, we should reward those who prevent problems from happening and build a culture where quality is designed in, where people are consistently using quality tools to improve their effectiveness and we, as leaders, provide education to make our workforce aware of what they can do or stop doing that will improve the quality experience of the customer. In the meantime, we encourage you to download and share our “7 Keys to Building a Quality Culture” infographic below.
