Steve, It sounds like your 'QA' people are actually working as QC (Quality Control) rather than Quality Assurance. QA surely should be monitoring and informing those involved in the production process rather than actually policing it! Perhaps your 'QA' people need re-educating in what their job actually should and should not entail. Go/No Go pictures for inspection certainly have their place (good old IPC-610) but people need to be taught that 'ugly' solder joints are not necessarily bad solder joints! You sure have your work cut out Steve......let me guess - you have no budget for retraining! Justin Braime Compuspec Industries Auckland, New Zealand ----- Original Message ----- From: Stephen R. Gregory To: [log in to unmask] Sent: Tuesday, February 08, 2000 3:04 PM Subject: [TN] Rework vs. Quality... Hi ya'll! I know this is going to be question with no easy answers. What I want to ask is how do you go about evaluating the real effort that is being expended on rework or touch-up? Then prove what was necessary, and what wasn't? To set the stage, the process is mainly "gate-inspection" (I know that's not desirable) but that's what it is. Past history has been to meet standards that match a picture (Martin Marrietta comes to mind). Not whether or not touch-up or rework is adding any reliability or value to the finished product, or is just make it look like the pictures. (reading between the lines;..that quality mindset is THOROUGHLY ingrained here) So how do you getting a good un-biased snap-shot of what is actually going on out on the floor, and then go about changing things? I believe that there is no simple way. It's going to take a lot of time and effort to take assemblies that are in process, identify them by way of a serial number or some other means, have a referee (knowledgeable unbiased person) inspect them after each major process to determine what (if any) defects are on each assembly, then let them continue on through the process with the instructions that any rework or touch-up performed on the assemblies must be documented as accurately and completely as possible as to what defects were observed, where, and why they were reworked. Then afterwords, an assessment done on the whole quality process. As you may guess, there is some thought going around that we rework more things than we need to. I'm just trying to find a way that will be the most effective, and that will be as unbiased as possible. Also as you may guess, this subject can get pretty emotional with the QA folks...I butt heads every single day. I want to find a way that nobody can argue with. Yes, It does still seem a little silly that I need to secretly strategize a plan to bring out the realities of the situation in order to convince certain people to change their philosophies. But I have been asked to do it, and I got the the task because they think that I have a magic solution to change certain mind-sets, but I don't. I'm asking if any of ya'll have had to go through a situation such as this, and what you did to resolve the obvious issues... Thanks everybody! -Steve Gregory- ############################################################## TechNet Mail List provided as a free service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8c ############################################################## To subscribe/unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in the body: To subscribe: SUBSCRIBE TECHNET <your full name> To unsubscribe: SIGNOFF TECHNET ############################################################## Please visit IPC web site (http://www.ipc.org/html/forum.htm) for additional information. If you need assistance - contact Gayatri Sardeshpande at [log in to unmask] or 847-509-9700 ext.5365 ##############################################################