Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1426508
NOVEMBER 2021 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 51 first started coming out. When they started going from double-sided to a multilayer, it was like, "How many layers can you do? We do up to 22 here." He just lost his mind. He didn't under- stand that. From the standpoint of real manu- facturing coming out from what felt like the Stone Age, educating the shops to where we are today with TQM and our quality management system, it's a business management system. It's how we run our business. And that was a flip. When someone comes out to audit us, we don't look at it as, "Oh no, here comes an audi- tor." No, we look at it as someone with knowl- edge who will look at our system and say, "You can improve here, you can improve there." Because if you work in it, you might not see the forest for the trees. We are the best there can be until you have a third party come out and say, "Hey, just a minute here." It used to be that you sweated an audit. at's not the way we look at it. It's improving our business system. For a small business, it's really critical because resources, especially today, are in short supply. Even in our supply chain, there is short supply everywhere. You had better know everything about the business; you've got to have a handle on it. Matties: Let's talk about process improve- ment. We live process improvement in our own organization because business is nothing more than one process connecting to another. It's that critical 15%, first 15% handoff—if you don't get that right, it's all wrong, right? en you have to be focusing on the critical 20, because obviously 80% of your results come from the 20% of the inputs. O'Neil: at's how I look at it here. You can't control every little thing, but you're right, 80% of your results come out of 20% of those deci- sions that you made. Same with cost: 80% of the cost, 20% of the items out there. You con- trol those, and you're in good shape. Matties: Until you stop and question, "Why do we do it this way?" You don't know, and all this waste is inherently built in, and you just live with it because it's the way we've always done it. O'Neil: Yes, very true. For example, looking at when we started to develop into the QMS. My office is situated as such that you come through the door out of final inspection, you hang a hard right, and you head into inside sales. Our lead inspector, Chito, was making that trip six to seven times a day. I could see him doing it, and I wondered why Chito was always running up to inside sales. It was simply that he had a print, the print didn't match what was going on with the board and traveler, and he had to ask inside sales what was right. I thought, "Call the customer. at's right at the end of the pro- cess. You're going to ship that board that day and everybody's scrambling around." Matties: It's much too late. O'Neil: Yes. It was way too late in a process to do that. Part of our quality objectives was to ask, "Why do we do it this way?" We got the inside sales and final inspection folks together. We did the simple fishbone analysis, which is one of the best and simplest tools to use. Matties: Well, I see a fishbone on the wall right over your right shoulder. And the "five whys."