Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1259453
40 PCB007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2020 6. Proper training—which gives workers an understanding of their jobs, specific proce- dures to do their jobs correctly, and a meth- od of evaluation when training is complete— will result in quality improvement. Everyone knows his or her job and is in statistical con- trol, pursuing never-ending improvement. Further, everyone in an organization should be trained in basic statistical methods, and or- ganizations should foster everyone's ability to understand variation. My engineers and workers interpreted this to request "confidence tests" for each major process in printed circuit manufacturing—not the tests that the chemical lab does but simple tests for them to understand that the process was behaving correctly; otherwise, how could they be responsible for the quality of the PCBs? This was an interesting request, so engineering developed simple, short tests that each worker could perform in less than two minutes that provided that confidence. 7. Institute leadership at every level. The aim of leadership should be to help people and ma- chines to do a better job, not to assign blame. Attributes of a leader at any level are to be a coach, counselor, and facilitator—not judge and jury. 8. Fear is a malady that may not be apparent to top management, but it affects quality. Ma- ny managers and supervisors use their power to create fear because they believe the way to motivate employees is through coercive power, but it is not. During the COVID-19 pandemic, workers may be reluctant to voice a concern about how their job is performed while still ensuring that they will be safe for themselves and their families. Management has control over these work elements and is responsible for changing the organizational climate. 9. Barriers impede the smooth flow of the ex- tended process and its information, and ev- eryone suffers—especially the customer. The most notable effect is that it can cause mul- tiple interpretations of a given message. In his book [4] , Alfie Kohn said, "Operationally defin- ing the ultimate customer's needs and expec- tations so that everyone understands how he contributes to the success of the organization is a solid step to breaking down barriers be- tween departments." I always felt that HP's practice of having quarterly "beer and ham- burgers busts," where top management would tell us about business and then do the cooking and service while everyone else talked shop, solved more problems between departments than formal systems. 10. This is a tough one for management be- cause many expect that leadership includes being a cheerleader with slogans, which will motivate the individual to achieve and clarify what is expected of that person. Unfortunate- ly, it usually has the opposite effect. Targets and slogans that are set arbitrarily without an understanding of the process, as well as new methods to achieve such goals, are meaning- less and do not help anyone do a better job. Management owns the system. Examples of slogans, posters, and targets that do not help anyone do a better job are: • Do it right the first time • Safety is job number one • Increase return on net assets 3% next year • Decrease costs 10 percent next year These targets do not represent action state- ments for employees, but rather management's wishes for the desired result. Management is simply lazy or incompetent if it thinks its only responsibility is to create slogans rather than improving the system. 11. Similar to point #10, this is a tough point for management to swallow. Old-style man- agement believes they own the quota, produc- tion rates, and shipments, but these targets do not represent action statements for employees. Rather, they represent management's wish- es for the desired result and ignore quality, so they are at odds with the new philosophy Dr. Deming is talking about. Output—quanti- ty and quality—is based on the process's ca- pability as determined by statistical methods.