Operator QC

Details of a case study on the successful application of Operator Quality Control.

Vokes Limited are a medium sized company, researching, designing & manufacturing air and oil filters and bellows expansion joints. They are based in the South East of England.

As part of their World Class Initiative Vokes Limited has recently undergone very dramatic organisational changes. These changes were to divisionalise the organisation to promote the idea of cell design and manufacture. The objectives being to reinforce ownership, build team working and empowerment of the people within the cells or divisions. Generally, to promote a sense of self reliance and determination and to focus attention on the process. These changes had been successfully introduced and had embraced the Quality Department. Each of the new divisions had their own Quality Representative with inspectors working for that Quality Representative.

These changes had impacted on the manufacturing areas and some of the administrative and design areas. The changes in the quality structure did not reflect the new culture of the organisation, namely the movement towards process owners, team working and clearer responsibilities.

Added to these issues of ownership, there were problems with the routing or planning system, where the inspector was expected to sign off each of the operations as satisfactorily completed and stamp the appropriate documentation. A fairly simple calculation indicated that with the number of products and operations requiring inspection grossly outweighed inspection resource. Also, the idea that inspectors inspected work reinforced still further that quality was the responsibility of the Quality Department and not the person who did the job. This obviously did not fit in with the new philosophy ownership for quality.

Fairly fundamental changes were required, not only because of the above but also to the culture of the organisation as well. There were a number of groups with vested interests. Vested, not necessarily in a negative sense but in the sense that people felt they were under pressure, over-worked and had more than enough responsibility anyway. These groups included, the various managers, the supervisors, the Quality Department itself, operators and inspectors. Each of these groups needs had to be understood and sympathetically handled. This was to achieve the key objective of - process owners being responsible for the quality of the process output.

On the basis that reasonable people will accept change if the rationale for the change is properly explained to them, a project plan was drawn up. The project plan initially consisted of:

Presentation to management

Presentation to the quality assurance team

Presentation to inspectors

Presentation to supervisors

These presentations needed to be very carefully handled because at the end of the presentations it was necessary to gain commitment (a yes) to the forthcoming programme. Without a "yes" from each of these groups there was little hope in moving towards clearer responsibilities for operator quality control.

Commitment was gained from all groups not by coercion but by a general agreement that this was the correct and sensible approach.

The next stage was to create documentation and work instructions which described the role of the inspector and operator. This documentation also provided the operator with clear work instructions that indicated what needed to take place concerning the checks. An example these can be seen in table 1.

It was then necessary for the supervisors to talk through with the operators the new roles and responsibilities and agree the checks that were necessary. Very often the operators had a better idea than either supervision or inspection of the checks that were necessary to ensure that the process ran smoothly. This again reinforced the team idea. Supervisors working with operators as a team, with assistance from the inspectors in generating the necessary documentation.

The stages are being described as a series of events - in practice much of the work was carried out in parallel.

The next stage was to change the roles and responsibilities of the inspectors. The process owners had been identified, now what we needed to do was to identify the process monitors. These could be inspectors, but not necessarily. It was the responsibility of the Division to identify the process monitors. The approach chosen was to train a pool of inspectors and other personnel who could become process monitors or auditors.

There were two styles of auditing to be used. In the design, contracts and planning area the audit could be achieved by a less structured approach - using the procedures that were available and auditing directly against the procedures. In the case of the shop floor a more structured approach was adopted. The audits would be slightly more frequent, and they would be against a specified checklist (see table 2).

Note inspection audit is different because it is:

more detailed
more specific
more frequent

Again this required training. This training took place as: teaching the inspectors and other personnel how to audit. Getting the trainee to perform an audit and then presenting their audit reports to the respective managers. Calibrating the audits to ensure that they were achieving the correct standard (before they were awarded a certificate.)

One key concern with all of this was, that while the operators were under pressure to produce work as efficiently and effectively as possible, they were also on a bonus scheme. The major concern was that this would be seen in some way to conflict with their new role to inspect their own work. In the event this concern was misplaced. Subsequent events showed that this did not become an issue. Mainly, it is believed because the issues and rationale behind taking this approach was clearly explained to the operators and consequently they understood the needs for this approach.

Introduction of operator quality control has played a major parts in helping all the company's employees to recognise that quality is no longer the responsibility of the quality department. Everyone in some way is involved in quality assurance now the response to quality assurance is far more inquisitive, much more positive, even competitive.

The purpose of this paper is to give heart to those people who are still struggling with new quality assurance initiatives and provide hope that they can learn from our example, that changes in culture and philosophy are possible. Given that new initiatives are introduced and set up in the correct way.

Footnote: Vokes are ISO9000 approved and audited by numerous organisations. This approach does not conflict with ISO9000, if anything IS0 9000 actually supports this style of approach to quality assurance management.

If anyone should wish to discuss any aspects of this article Geoff Vorley can be contacted at Quality Management & Training Limited. POBox 172, Guildford, Surrey, GU2 8AL