Manufacturing Perspective

by Peter Blackler

1984….no not the George Orwell novel, it was the year I started at Checon. The company had been in business for nearly 25 years, well established, and for me it was the beginning of what would be a fascinating and ever changing career in manufacturing.

Business was booming, I had been hired to run the second shift pressroom operation. The shift was less than a year old and had been established to fill the abundance of orders one shift could not handle alone, and it was exciting. The tone of the company was well defined; each person was responsible for their own quality.  We didn’t have a quality department, no roving inspectors. We had prints, tools to measure with and the responsibility to insure the product we produced met the print. What I didn’t realize at the time was that this very simple, logical principle would be the hallmark of a revolution in US manufacturing.

The “Quality Revolution” arrived; everyone was talking about the importance of quality, and a new concept, empowering the manufacturing floor with the responsibility for their quality. From the Checon perspective it was not so much a revolution as recognition of a principle Don Conaway had instilled in the company from the beginning.  Our customers were touting the benefits of eliminating the costs of QC personnel, and empowering the employees with the tools to make decisions at the point of manufacture. For us, it was the opposite; we had operators controlling their quality and processes, we needed to establish the infrastructure, a department to manage communication, data collection, SPC….etc, everything the customers expected.  So over time I went from Second shift to First, worked very closely with an engineer who was educated in the terminology and methodology of Quality, signed up for night classes, and within a few years was promoted to the position of Quality Manager within the company.

Was our quality perfect in those years, wish I could say it was. What I can say is our quality had been meeting our customers’ needs, but those needs were changing. The industry was moving from hand assembly to more and more automation and very quickly.  At times our quality lagged behind, but we always had the one thing no one in our industry could beat. We cared! We cared about our customers, our quality, our delivery, and our employees. It was that caring that carried us through, because no matter how difficult it was our customers knew that we were committed, and we would prevail.  Eventually we established the foundation for the quality systems we have in place today. Savings, yes we saw savings, perhaps it took us longer to find the savings because as I mentioned, we had to build and staff a department we had never had before, but in the end the higher yields and significantly more stable processes paid off in dividends.

NEXT: Where o where did the customers move to