May 2006

Q.  My manufacturing department thinks my quality department is the enemy every time they come out to the floor.  And for the most part, my quality department acts like the enemy – it’s like they’re always looking for something to be wrong.  How do I get my people to get along?

A.  The short answer is, it’s your company – it should run the way you want.

Generally, when I come across the situation described above, the owner or other executive management in the company isn’t really clear on what they expect from the company, so neither is the rest of the company clear on what’s expected of them.  It’s not merely by coincidence that, after working with over 400 manufacturers in the past 20 years, I established Business Consulting Services by David Marsh on the principle of Helping Your Business Achieve Its Goals._™

Ultimately, you have to decide what you want your company to do – what goals would have to be achieved in order to make your company successful.  And BCS can help you sort through the minutia of daily operations to get to what’s really important to you.

Once your direction is firmly resolved, BCS can help you determine feasible opportunities in that direction, and we can help you establish strategies to turn those opportunities into reality.  Part of those strategies will be to ensure performance objectives are established as necessary throughout your organization; those objectives will be interwoven so that various departments – including manufacturing and quality – understand how their performance impacts each other and your overall success:  the achievement of your business goals.

Okay, so to be specific to the manufacturing and quality functions as described in this scenario, it’s been my experience that the most effective organizations recognize quality as playing the roles of both manufacturing support (i.e. improvement) as well as final gate-keeper.  This means that quality has to recognize manufacturing as their customer, not their kicking post.  If poor quality is detected at the gate-keeper function (e.g. final inspection, dock audit, etc.) – or worse yet, at the customer or in cost over-runs – quality has to recognize that they failed to effectively support your manufacturing functions.  If appropriate, manufacturing has to recognize that they failed to accept quality’s support.  And most important, as the executive management over both groups, you have to hold the appropriate parties accountable for their performance. 

Helping set performance objectives that support organizational goals is part of the overall strategy development that BCS provides its Clients.  If you would like to discuss the application of these proven techniques under your company’s specific conditions, please email info@bcsbydm.com or call us at 815-728-1710 to schedule an appointment.