MANUFACTURING QUALITY and COST

At one point in my Motorola career I was seen as a problem solver.  And I was given the job of leaving the US as an expat, and going to a Motorola Division in England.  There we had a $1 billion dollar division that was losing $100 million a year.  But as they say on TV - "wait!  that is not all!".  It also was judged to have one third the quality of our competitor and also could not ship on time.  As for not shipping on time, they had 666 order delinquencies when I asked them the question.  Oddly of course, that was the sign of the devil. 

But at least the quality and cost and delivery side of the job was not as bothersome as some might think.  There were methods in general to improve each of those.  It would mostly be - "work" - to determine where they were and what needed to be done.  In this case, some of what was needed they knew.  In some other cases, we had to start at basics.  But what I am saying here is that, there is often a process that can lead to success for these items - if the goal is set.

Quality of course can get quite complex.  Since I was from Motorola, I was also deep into six-sigma.  Six Sigma was being fostered by the Motorola Head of Quality at the time, Dick Buetow, a soft spoken highly ethical man that I admired.  But I would believe that we in Motorola viewed six sigma differently than most others do.  We quickly got it down to goals we could work with.  To this day, I am not certain that many actually achieve six sigma, but taking the path to get there generally improves the quality so much, it becomes less of an issue. 

Some telephone networks today actually go beyond six sigma and get into "availability" - a quality concept that might be more appropriate for certain organizations.  "Availability" is an interesting subject since it also can get into quality of satellites.  Of course no one wishes a satellite to fail since it is quite hard to get a technician up there.  One Motorola division that was in the satellite business that I visited told me that they did not have a failed mission in over 40 years.  Theirs was an interesting story.  But yes it is possible to do that - the way that "availability" is used and measured.

There are also a multitude of measurement systems for quality.  Some are helpful and some are less helpful, but let us be honest.  Some times the more awards a group can achieve the easier it is to acquire trust on your sales.  Once when I was being announced as the new Sr. VP of a start up firm, the press release, picked up briefly by Forbes online, said that among other things, that I had 13 software copyrights.  While that was true, I had no idea someone might care.  As I say, awards never hurt.  And some days they can help.

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