Quality Recovery and Rework - When It All Goes Wrong

When Quality is the Target, but not the Result, what do you do?

While Quality may be the overarching goal of all production, stuff happens, resulting in non-conforming parts. This results in failure verification, rework, recalls, sorting, kitting, retest, relabeling and pipeline management, which are facts of life in the manufacturing, assembly and production world we live in.

So, when it all goes wrong, what do you do?

In a previous article in this series, we discussed the process. Briefly, you must:

1. Assess exposure and manage risk at each stage of the fulfillment process;

2. Figure out what went wrong (root cause);

3. Fix it at the factory and get it back on line ASAP;

4. Figure out what you're going to do about all the material in transit, at customer assembly and inventory locations, and already sold through to an end user.

Your people are the experts on your products and on your customers, so there is no way around these experts being intimately involved in root cause analysis and in figuring out what has to be done at the factory. You can hire consultants and/or facilitators to streamline the process to getting to root cause and solution, but the experts and management must take ultimate responsibility for parts 1, 2 and 3.

There is far more flexibility in the 4th part. This is the tedious, messy and time-consuming part of the job, and is generally not a core competency of the organization in trouble. Ultimate customer satisfaction depends on competent and rapid execution of failure verification, sorting, reworking, testing, labeling, packaging, pipeline management and crisis logistics.

Options and Alternatives:Most Project Managers and Quality Managers do not realize that there are companies that can take over the most tedious and frustrating parts of the recovery process. With that in mind, let's examine your options and their consequences:

1. Keep it all in-house (subtle, but potentially far-reaching negative ramifications) - The Good News: The people who are most likely to be familiar with the problem, the product and its quirks are right there, concerned and capable. The Bad News: The engineers, technicians, logistics personnel, production personnel, management and facilities all generally have full-time jobs that keep them busy 10 to 16 hours a day, just to meet set schedules and deadlines to keep the company moving on its projected path. It is these same people who are going to be tasked to take on this additional, unexpected and often significant workload at the expense of their current assignments. This tends to mortgage the company's future, but the urgency and necessity of getting though the crisis overshadows this concern for the moment. Everyone pitches in, does what it takes, and in the excitement, fails to look up long enough to consider, much less do, the sensible thing. The results of this approach are mistakes in the recovery and a hurried or unfinished release of the next project, each leading to additional crisis and continuing the spiral of missed product cycles, poor quality, low yields, and substandard product.

2. Write a check - Outsource parts of the crisis - This is almost universally unrecognized as an alternative, but from a Business perspective, it is the only way to go. If you are in Quality Management or Project management, your company expects you to make decisions that are best for the company and its bottom line. Often, you are so focused on getting the problem solved with resources you know and trust that you don't stop to consider the alternatives - especially the alternatives you are unaware of.

Early in my career, I was unaware that there were organizations that specialized in rework, or "Quality Recovery". I suffered terribly through many miserable reworks, often supervising a bunch of random unskilled temps in hastily set up warehouses with processes that evolved as the rework progressed. I remember that a task as simple as keeping track of labeled boxes, matching serial numbers on the box labels to serial numbers on