Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1259453
JUNE 2020 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 25 Korf: Yes. You get focused on creating the pro- cess and paperwork versus the impact. I see this in quality improvement, Lean teams, every- thing. People get so enamored of making sure the paperwork is correct, and at the end of the day, you don't have any impact. All the paper is completed, and it looks like you're doing some- thing good, but in reality, you're not. Board shops, as you know, do not have unlimited profits. There's very tight profitability. You have to assign your resources very succinctly and make the most money with what you have. You need to work on the bigger projects, and every- one knows what the biggest areas are, meaning the biggest scrap areas or those with the high- est defects. They can focus on that, and those types of programs tend to get better results from a bottom-line standpoint versus having 100 de- partments compete against each other. Johnson: It needs to be a means to an end. Ultimately, the reason for TQM is to increase your profits to run more efficiently and make more money. If it's not achieving that, it's not working. Korf: And be careful that you do not get such a low cost that the quality of the end product to the customer suffers. You can save a lot of money by doing things you don't normally do that could affect the reliability in such a way that the customer may have more problems, which is the worst thing that can possibly hap- pen. There's a balance there. If you have good engineers, which most shops do, you know which processes you shouldn't cut corners on, or how far you can go before you're putting in some acceptable risk or an extreme amount of risk in the shippable product. TQM's goal is not to negatively affect PCB performance. Johnson: If you're serious about what you're doing with TQM, you identify areas that need to change, whether those areas are your pro- cesses, business methods, staffing, or even the equipment in your facility. Korf: Change is interesting. I've always said there are two factors. First, the senior manage- ment of the business department needs to be fully supportive of what's going on. In other words, they can't say, "I don't like it because I didn't put it in myself," or, "I'm going to lose interest after a month." If that happens and employees see it, they lose interest. Second, humans fundamentally hate change. It's fundamental to how we were raised and how we're born. There are ways to implement change such that the people will support it. The first fear is, "We're trying to reduce costs to lay people off." Sometimes that's valid. You're try- ing to reduce resources, but you can show how you can get more out of the current resources so that you don't have to hire more people, which you can show. I've done this multiple times. You can make more money because you now have more value to the company. The other key item is documentation. Ev- erything needs to be documented. The initial reaction is to write tons of procedures. You might have several hundred procedures writ- ten down, and you'll pass every single quality audit from a customer because they say, "You have a procedure for everything. You're good." I took over one group's point in an audit one time. They were struggling on a quality basis and throughput. I sat down with one of the operators one day and said, "How many pro- cedures apply to you?" They didn't know even though they were fully trained theoretically. I also asked, "How many procedures do you have?" and they didn't know. I started digging through the system. There were 120 procedures or portions of procedures they were expected to understand and be fully trained in. That's not possible. We said, "Let's make it so each person has one procedure to Humans fundamentally hate change. It's fundamental to how we were raised and how we're born.