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 -----
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-
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