Tag Archives: quality

It’s The Product, Stupid – Unintended Consequences

4 Mar

So I’m in the shower at the Rec Center this morning, using yet another brand of body wash.  Why, you ask?  Well, it’s not that I don’t have a favorite; I do.  I am a fan of Axe, even though their ad campaigns and product graphics are, well, juvenile.  I think they have a great body wash and I would use it every day, but I don’t.

Why not?  No, it’s not because young women were starting to pester me, it’s much more mundane than that.

It has to do with the bottle design.  The bottle ‘opens’ by pushing down on the back of the lid, which works like a rocker switch to open the front of the lid.  Clever design until the day when, jostled around in my travel bag, the lid opens, spilling Axe all over the inside of the bag.  It only had to happen a couple of times to make me realize that Axe was not for travel, only for home.   So now, I switch from brand to brand looking for an alternative.  The initial criteria is, the bottle can’t be opened accidentally, after that, I consider the actual contents of the bottle.

The moral of the story?  the ‘product’ is not just what’s inside the container, it is the entire experience.  Axe failed to provide the ‘product’ that I could safely bring to the rec center every morning, and now they are relegated to twice a week use.

Do you know if this is happening with your product?  Are there ‘un-intended consequences’ to your design?  You better find out!

- RTR

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All Business Is The Same, It Just Looks Different

22 Mar

Chairman of La Rosa’s Pizza, T. D. Hughes, is fond of saying, “All Business Is The Same, It Just Looks Different”.  Well, I’m here to tell you as I begin day 4 at Vinimaya, when you talk about small, entrepreneurial software companies, it doesn’t look different either!

Examples:

Next man in:

This phrase is typically heard in a sports context (or military, I suppose).  When someone ‘goes down’, the next man (woman) in picks up the task and runs with it.  No one needs to ask, no one waits for permission.  It just gets done.  With one Client Service Manager stuck in business travel purgatory, another stepped in to solve a pressing customer issue.   The new guy (yours truly)  didn’t have to do anything, in fact, I didn’t even know it happened until after the problem was solved.

We’re overworked AND driven:

In my initial interviews with my team, there were comments that I more or less expected, walking into a role that had been largely vacant for 3-4 months.  People needed to vent, but even through the turmoil and frustration, nothing gets in the way of doing the right thing for the customer.  There is no one RIP here (‘Retired In Place”).

Diplomacy:

There is always a delicate balance between doing what’s right for the customer, and doing the customer’s job for them, especially with a product that is such a key element of the customer’s procurement infrastructure.  The level of diplomacy required is significant.  Seeing this diplomacy at work is great, I’ve seen some examples already that would make Dale Carnegie smile.

Not Enough Time for Quandrant II:

The self help ‘bible’ of the 1990′s “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” talks to the value of ‘Quadrant II activities‘, the activities that are important, but not urgent.  The speed and urgency of everything that goes on in the small entrepreneurial software company environment tends to drive quadrant II activities back into the shadows.  I believe my job is to help facilitate a proper balance.

Well, that’s enough for now, nearly a week in and still lovin’ it.

- RTR

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Is Being Unique Unique? Is Being Unique Enough?

27 Feb

Is anything sustainable and unique?

Yogi Berra once said, “This is like Déjà vu all over again”

John Franzosa once said, “There’s a difference between 20 years experience and 1 year experience 20 times” (actually, my Dad said this a lot more than once).

There is an excitement, a freshness when a child first discovers the things that soon become commonplace.  I especially enjoyed hearing all of those awful corny jokes from my kids when they first discovered ‘humor’ in the 2nd or 3rd grade.

From the reverse perspective, when they become young adults and you, as a parent, begin to look for their perspective? That is also very cool.

At a certain level, we are all unique.  At a certain level we are all the same (I think I learned this watching ‘Sesame Street’ with my kids)…

The point of my topic?

In the world of business, uniqueness can be a red flag.  What we disparagingly call ‘bleeding edge’ technology…

There will always be a subset of companies that are drawn to the ‘bleeding edge’, the “early adopters”.  It is not particularly difficult to attract early adopters.

Many new technology firms start fast out of the chute, only to lose momentum in trying to get to the ‘mainstream’.   Does uniqueness work for or against a company when they hit that lull, when they move from early adopter to mainstream?

Ultimately, I think that companies that just rely on being ‘unique’ will stumble.  What matters in business (and in life, I suppose), is being dependable and adding value.  Don’t get hung up on unique.  We can’t all be Steve Jobs, but we can all be dependable and we can all add value.

- RTR

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Why Didn’t I Think of That? Intellectual Diversity

9 Feb

Bronwyn Fryer wrote an interesting article in the Harvard Business Review blog titled “Wanted: Idea Fusers”.  She uses examples such as Steve Jobs (everyone’s favorite example) and his fusion of calligraphy and technology in creating the Macintosh user interface.

In the closing paragraph, Fryer issues a challenge:

Now, take a good look at the people your company hires. Do they come from all kinds of different backgrounds and experiences? My guess is that there may be a diversity policy on the books, and that there are people of different genders and races. But we need more diversity than that. We need much more intellectual diversity, and we need to find ways to put unlike ideas together in new ways.

Connecting the dots here, I thought of my own family.  One of the things I always admired about my wife is how she encouraged our children to be self-sufficient and find their own way at a very early age.  They learned to make their own meals, do their own chores MUCH earlier in life than I would have expected.  I remember our youngest filling a pot of water and putting it on the stove to make tortellini when he couldn’t even see the top of the stove!

When the kids were frustrated, she would say “Use your words”.  When they were punished for some disgression, they would not be allowed out of “time-out” until they could present a ‘plan’ for how they would act in the future when faced with a similar situation.

I was more old school, resorting to “… because I SAID SO!” as a reason way too often.

Our children became independent thinkers, unafraid to present what we now call ‘out-of-the-box’ solutions.  All three of our children turned out to be great adults.

Ms. Fryer is really on to something with her comments.  Most organization do NOT gravitate toward people who think differently.

Our children took different educational paths when we moved to Cincinnati from Boston.  Our middle child started 1st grade in the local public elementary school, and followed the public school path through high school, the youngest was in Catholic school from Kindergarten on.   Regardless of the school choice, the boys (not as socially adept as their big sister) were sometimes a ‘challenge’ to the elementary school environment, due to their out-of-the-box independent thinking.  In both cases there were teachers along the way that saw their potential and nurtured it, but I sometimes wonder, what if my wife and I were BOTH “because I said so” parents?  What if our children’s educational experience had not included those teachers that saw their true value?

I think the same applies to business organizations.  We naturally gravitate towards people who think and act like us.  Free thinkers can be a burden.  They can be disruptive.  They’re not like us…

I believe that it’s a rare organization that can foster free thinking and idea fusing and survive over time.  Eventually the success of the free thinking culture is challenged by market forces, and management brings in a ‘proven leader’ to whip the organization into shape.  Think Apple during Steve Jobs ‘hiatus’.   The non-conformists desert, the company becomes another nameless, faceless organization and another ‘idea fusing’ start up kicks them out of the limelight.  What would Apple look like today if Steve Jobs had not returned?

It’s not enough to find idea fusers, you need to be able to foster their growth and understand that not all fused ideas will be winners.  It will be a wild ride, but definitely worth the journey!

- RTR

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Quality Management Software – A Victim of Culture?

16 Jan

I’m looking forward to what Matt Littlefield (LNS) will be writing about Quality Management Software.  This is an area that, in some ways, appears to be a victim of its own culture.

Let’s go back to the days of stone tablets (‘scuse me) paper-based processes in manufacturing.  Like last week, for example.  The quality department and quality processes were always adjunct to actual production.   Design engineers would design a product and would work with quality engineering to define those critical characteristics that need to be tracked through manufacturing.  Let’s say this is an aircraft part/assembly that is being built for a larger OEM, or, for that matter, built by a supplier.  Throughout this supply chain, there is the need to produce a ‘first article’ (for quality), with a corresponding AS9102 filing to document this first article.  Inspectors work with the shop to insure that all of this first article data is collected (on paper) and forms are filled out to comply with the OEM/customers process.

Once in full production, the quality organization is then tasked with providing inspection resources to insure that part/product quality is maintained.  If there is a question on the floor?  Call an inspector.

I visited a consumer products company, a big ERP user, to meet with their quality organization.  They were looking for a paperless system.  I was a bit puzzled, as the products they made were made by highly automated systems.  When we sat down in the quality office, the reason was clear.  We were surrounded by Iron Mountain storage boxes full of data collection sheets.  In this highly automated plant, there were requirements to collect quality data, on an hourly basis, on paper forms.  These forms were then reviewed by a quality person, and an OK was given to ship product.  This OK (or rejection) coming days after the product was completed (the product was stored in a warehouse, awaiting quality approval).  Even in this highly automated plant, quality was separate.

So, how does this make quality management systems a victim of their own culture?  It’s the paradigm.  Quality is something external to the production process.  QMS systems tend to become an electronic version; another system that manages a specific user community.

What if quality was just part of the process?  What if these quality issues and processes just became part of an overall electronic business management environment?  There are MES vendors that have taken this approach, but it shouldn’t start and end there.  When you look at most ERP, PLM and MES solutions, quality is still a separate module, not part of the main business workflow.

Until that happens, Quality Management Software might just become an electronic replacement for “the way we’ve always done things”.

-RTR

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MOM, MES, and what’s wrong with Paper on Glass?

9 Jan

More on this subject that is near and dear to my heart.  Matt Littlefield (@M_Littlefield) responded to my comment on his blog:

I have found when companies implement a “paperless manufacturing” system it is important not to just take a “paper-on-glass” approach. Or if such an approach is taken, that it is just a first step. 
 
Often, if all a company does is automate their current business processes and doesn’t look to evolve and optimize processes, much of the potential benefit of these systems are left unrealized. 
 
It sounds like you are more in the camp of using paperless manufacturing to evolve and optimize new best practices rather than just automating the past with “paper-on-glass”. 

Yes, Matt.  We are in that camp.

A customer of ours was asked what, if anything, they would have done differently with our system.  Their response (paraphrasing)?  “We would not have treated it as a replacement for our old system, we would have looked at what it could do, without considering the baggage of our old way of doing things.”

However, don’t sell ‘paper on glass’ short….

In the markets we support, the issue that, more often than not, will slow or stop the sales process is, “your demo looks great, but how do we get there?”  That objection is not based solely on the rampant (and possibly justified) mistrust of software vendors.  It’s also based on fear…

The typical fears:

  • The implementation will take twice as long, cost twice as much AND not be what we expected;
  • The time and effort required to ‘migrate’ our data and rewrite our instructions is a non-productive use of valuable manufacturing engineering resources;
  • We don’t really KNOW what we want to accomplish with this implementation, and coming to an agreement with a diverse set of players will be difficult. 

but the biggest fear is:

  • It will be too ‘different’.  The end users will reject it, and we’ll be worse off than we were before.

That’s where paper on glass comes in.  What if the information required on the shop floor did not have to be recreated, reconstituted, reformatted?  What if it could be used as-is?  Then, the modernization task can be focused on the PROCESS instead of the CONTENT. 

The benefits of starting with paper on glass?

  • More rapid implementation
  • A familiar look/feel to instructions
  • Minimized training time
  • Faster user acceptance

We have learned that, no matter how much time and effort is put into on-site assessments, technical specifications, implementation project details, there are two things that can’t be denied:

1) If it’s not accepted, it won’t be successful.

2) Things change.  The process you defined months ago may not work today and will be tweaked, numerous times, over the life of the system.

Is paper on glass the solution?  No, but paper on glass is the perfect ‘on-ramp’ to the paperless superhighway…

-RTR

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ANOTHER acronym? QRC Systems

21 Nov

Part of me wanted to run screaming for the door when I read this paper from ARC Advisory Group with yet another new acronym, QRC (Quality, Risk & Compliance).  Maybe that’s just because I’m acronym-challenged.  That aside, the paper raises a complex and important issue. 

The connection between quality, risk and compliance is strong, and now industries beyond aerospace & defense, pharma and medical device are all seeing the effects of new regulations and the added effort in complying with them. 
Has this gone to far? We have all seen the peanut butter jars in the supermarket that say: “Warning, contains peanuts”…  Really?  Shouldn’t that be obvious? The fact is, it doesn’t matter.  In the litigious world we live in the issue of “QRC” is here to stay. 

Truly achieving compliance, minimizing risk and assuring quality today almost demands electronic oversight.  The days of filling out paper forms will be rapidly disappearing.  Remember, when you think of QRC, your compliance, your quality AND your risk are totally dependent on the completeness and quality of the manufacturing data you collect.

We have provided paperless manufacturing systems for more than a decade and a half, and the major driver for these systems is compliance.  Learn more at CIMx

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