Sorry to have parted so long. I will try to be more
regular.
Zero Defects - Where to start?
Recommend that you begin with:
1. Spotlessness - Get everyone involved in looking around them and
begin to clean up their work area, like being in the Army when you know the
General is coming or when you know that a guest is coming to your house, you
tend to put things in visual order.
2. Order - Like with the 5 S technique you want everything to be kept at
a certain place, well marked, easy to find, visually pleasing, easy to spot
defectives, and easy to tell the number of items in front of you. When
you consider that the next person to receive your work is your customer you
want them to receive things nicely. When you send someone some candy, you
don't pile up it up; Imagine receiving a box of candy with the chocolates
just piled on top of each other.
3. Pre-set – only what is needed is in front of you, tools exactly
placed, easy to reach, and marked. You take only those parts you need to
be assembled. Start off with a small batch. Say you are going to
build 100 items, take only 10 of each and assemble only ten; use a template to
place the parts on and when you assemble the 10 items, if any parts are left over there
is a chance you might have missed using that one part and you only have ten to items to re-check.
4. Pre-inspect – take just an extra second and inspect every part before
you use it. Stop and watch your fellow worker to see if they are
pre-inspecting. You can learn a lot just by looking.
5. Do it – assemble it precisely in the best way
possible. Learn standard work which is to have in front of you the exact
instructions of how to do your work with precision. Check your quality
standards and note down any discrepancies.
6. Post-inspect – stop for a second to make sure the work you did
was done exactly right. Make sure that there are no scratches, no mars,
no burrs, and that no defects will be passed on to your customer.
7. Order – check that the exact number of items needed is going to be
past on to your customer. When I first moved to Portland Oregon I went to shop at a Safeway
Supermarket Food Store. I spent just a few minutes as the sight was so
unpleasing. A few years later while running a workshop on customer
service one of the attendees told me what great customer service they received
at a Safeway. At first, I couldn't believe it but the attendee insisted
that I go back and check. What a pleasant surprise to see such a spotless
and immaculate store. Safeway has seven attributes which I will write
about in the next article. But, Safeway insures spotlessness by having
one of their managers take every single hour of the working day a walk around
the store just looking to make sure that everything is in exact order.
It only takes a few minutes but what a powerful way to insure that the store
stays spotless - try it in your company.
Once you have gone through the first seven steps than our challenge is to really go after zero defects through our poka-yoke devices. Talk to you about this a little bit later.
Best,
Norman Bodek
And please do read my two new books: Rebirth of American Industry and JIT IS FLOW.
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