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Should Quality Controllers be Sacked?

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There are various factors to consider when buying a product, but the two main areas must surely be price and quality.

Price is easy - the only three options you have are up, down or same. That's it. Quality is much more involved. Firstly we cannot judge or even quantify the quality of a product if we don't have a yardstick. There are two ways to do this and both have their place. Firstly, find an equivalent product sold by a rival company and compare its attributes with your own product. Better still, obtain all competing products and produce a checklist of each product's attributes, comparing each with the other. Now add your own product to the mix and see where it lands in the quality hierarchy.

A second way of measuring quality is to produce a product specification (the above comparison exercise could feed in to this).  Most specifications allow tolerances for certain attributes. A shirt's line of stitching may need to be within a channel rather than in a perfect straight line, for instance. The amount of glue seepage from a fibreboard box join may be allowable if no more than 2 millimetres from the join. Certain attributes may have no tolerance at all, especially when it comes to a critical function of the product (such as an on/off switch on an electrical appliance). Health and safety aspects will usually have no tolerance as will legal aspects. For instance, an incorrectly wired mains plug will not be acceptable as will incorrect labelling of contents, if this contravenes the law.

Then you need to decide what to do if a product is outside the given tolerances. If it is a food product, it may be sold off to a jobber or even disposed of. If it is a factory-made product it may be sent back for re-working.  But what if the production manager is under pressure to get goods out to the customer and the quality controller finds that it is out of specification? There are a multitude of solutions ranging from "send it back" to "ignore it". In between are various solutions such as putting the monkey on the customer's shoulders: "you can have it now with minor defects or you can wait until tomorrow for the in-specification product. Up to you".

This dilemma will be familiar to production facilities around the world. The production staff have pulled out all the stops to meet their deadline - and very proud of themselves too - and the quality controller rejects it. Often the quality control function will have a separate reporting structure giving them independence from production. The lines will converge somewhere, and often with the CEO. And here is a scene repeated around the world, countless times every day: the quality control representative and the production representative arguing their respective cases in front of the boss. "I paid thousands in overtime to get this product out!", says the production man. "The product is not acceptable", says the Quality controller. "It's only marginally out of specification", says production....and so on.

Why is this scene played out so often? The boss is in an impossible situation where he will let his customer down one way or another. Does he come open with his customer and share his problem with them or does he let the product go through and hope and pray? Or does he simply stop the product from going out and say to the customer "do what you will, but I'm not letting a substandard product leave this factory".

It's easy to sit and read this and say: "don't let it go out". This is great in theory, but if it means you will lose your customer altogether if they don't receive their order on time then you are in a zero game. Just take my earlier method of checking quality: when the competitor products are being lined up for comparison, our boss' product won't even be in the line up if it never made it to the customer! This is the dilemma in essence: what is worst, a product with defects or no product at all? As I said, it is a zero game.

It is of course  nonsensical to let things go this far. Yet it happens everywhere and happens all the time. There are conflicting theories as to whether the quality control function should be separated from production or whether it should be part of production. There is no easy answer. If the quality controllers were in the production plant instead of outside it, would they be on the "reject it" side or the "let it through" side? Bear in mind that they are as culpable - if not more so - as the production manager if the finished product is not up to standard. By mixing the quality controllers in with the production staff there is a danger that things will get personal. This in-built friction will be a battle of wills and the winner will be the person or people with the most assertive personality. Not the way to run a production line!

So what is the answer? Here is a radical one for you: get rid of the quality controllers. Make all the staff responsible for quality. Crucially, in tandem with this, make sure the production manager is responsible for quality and quantity in equal measure. His job should be to get the product out on time and at the right quality. Make sure his bonus is based on both measures and not weighted more one way than the other. The conflict between getting the product out and getting it right would not be played out in the CEOs office when it is too late, but in the production manager's head when planning production - even urgent production. And get a good production manager - you can afford to pay for the best now that you have no quality control staff.

A company that is known world-wide for superior quality is Insectocutor. The methods it employs obviously works as its fly killers are consistently of the highest standards and workmanship. The management team of Insectocutor are so confident of this that they guarantee their machines for 5 years. We sell a range of their products at our web site at Arkay Hygiene. Insectocutor staff and management need no lessons from me or anyone else on how to produce a product on time and at the highest standard of quality. They have been doing it for over 40 years!

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