TOCICO

Quality Control is very often the bottleneck in operations today. This situation is not often identified. The ERP system does not see it. The silo effect between operations and quality contributes to the problem not being recognized. Top management is often just not interested in that activity. In our significant experience of all types of industries throughout the world we find that Quality Control (Q.C.) is the bottleneck in more than half of organizations. This is remarkable. One of the reasons that leads to Q.C. having too much work is the continual increase in the quantity and complexity of quality controls of products. This is true whatever the industry, whether it be aeronautics, software development, luxury goods manufacturing, or the food industry. Another contributing factor is that it is not so easy to manage the performance of Quality Control. How does one maintain the right balance between rigorous work and productivity? It is managerially difficult to accept some sort of time per part. For the same reason it is very difficult to define the proper capacity (the number of controllers) during the budgeting process. When estimating the workload management often falls into the trap of wishful thinking and estimates (hopes) that the quality will improve next year. And because it is not a value-added operation management tends to limit expenses in this domain. This situation has significant consequences in that vast majority of industries where quality is still problematic. Some companies such as Toyota Motor Manufacturing have, after decades of hard work, reached levels of right first-time quality of the order the 5 to 50 defective Parts Per Million (ppm) produced. But the majority of organizations are living with scrap rates over one hundred time worse…without good reason. We will argue that Good Theory Of Constraints, like Good Lean, includes outstanding levels of operational quality. We will discuss why having a bottleneck in the quality domain is a very bad situation. Why it is possibly the worse possible department in which to have a capacity constraint. We will present a number of solutions that can easily be applied to improve these sorts of bottlenecks and hence the Throughput of the company. We will present 8 recent examples from various industries: steel making, luxury watches, aeronautics, paint production, rocket manufacturing and the nuclear industry. We will conclude by saying that it happens often, that it is a very unhealthy situation, but that it is easy to fix and once fixed this will have extraordinary impact on the organization’s performance in the short term and in the long term.