"After you'd gone through the QES classes," says Electromagnetic Division unit manager David Weunski, "you were supposed to go back to your unit and think of things that had been giving you problems over the years. . . . This one, of course, leaped out at me."
The solution, however, did not. Only after endless hours of brainstorming and conferences with suppliers did Weunski hit on a strategy. During the initial inspection, he realized, Spectrum employed gauges that indicated only when the bushings exceeded the correct dimensions of the finished product; not until later, after another layer of metal had been added in plating, did other problems show up. So Weunski ordered $7,000 worth of new gauges, one set to measure the raw bushing and another to measure the plated one, and donated duplicate sets of gauges to his vendors. "Before," he says, "we would probably have put the burden of buying the gauges on them. Now, the attitude is much more cooperative." And the early results, he adds, are dramatic. "When all of the gauges are in place, we could be talking about a doubling of productivity."
Then there was the matter of Department Number Nine at the Electromagnetic Division, which produces, among other things, shielded windows. These windows -- artfully crafted panels of dark, curved glass that are fastened to the front of a computer screen -- absorb the six or seven watts of radiated energy produced by some computer terminals, and thus prevent anyone from "reading" the screen's information at a distance. But they are inordinately difficult to manufacture. Composed of layers of glass, wire screening, and laminating materials, they tend to delaminate when exposed to temperature extremes. "At worst, rejects were running as high as 15%," says unit manager Cy Ley.
Although Number Nine already had been wrestling with the issue, Spectrum's quality initiative pushed it to take some radical steps, such as changing vendors. For instance, Homalite Inc., of Wilmington, Del., had once provided the parts for the plastic laminate, but had lost the contract to another supplier; then, when quality became a top concern, it got it back. "Basically," says Homalite general manager Rod J. Field, "we lost them on price, but won them back with quality.They sent a four- or five-man team down to review what we were doing here -- and then we were back in business."
Department Number Nine supervisors have also become aggressively receptive to suggestions from line personnel. "No one is really an expert except the person who's out there building that window," Ley concedes. "One of their suggestions actually increased our productivity by something like 50%."
The net effect: a scant .08% reject rate on the newest line of windows. "Because of the dramatic improvement," observes Venable, "we were actually able to reduce our pricing on this product line."
Then, of course, there was meek Ed Leofsky and his shutdown of the soldering section. Virtually overnight, in the new culture, Leofsky became a minor celebrity, and substandard solderability became a major issue. The Material Science Division focused on the problem for a month, then sought help from the surface chemistry laboratory that is operated by Lord Corp., also of Erie. Lord found surface contaminants that could have been causing the grief, but left it to the division's engineering staff to locate the source of the contaminants and eliminate them.
"That," Baker notes, "is when it really became frustrating." No sooner had one source been identified and dealt with, than another, and then another, would appear. The materials division seemed to be battling ghosts.
"It took two months," explains Leofsky, "before they began to make progress in pinpointing the troublesome areas. Since then, they've been tuning and fine-tuning all of their procedures." It was, he adds, an expenditure of manpower, capital, and concern that, in the past, would have been unthinkable. "We would never have gotten beyond justifying the return on investment," he says.
Overall, there are few people, processes, or products that haven't in some way been affected by Spectrum's quality crusade. There is now a vendor-selection committee, for example, and the number of active vendors has been trimmed by 8%. The company is also more demanding of customers. When it felt that one client's specifications for a filter used in the B-1 bomber were unattainable, it said so, and lost the work, but promptly got it back when the competitor that got the job discovered (and proved) that the unit couldn't be built as designed. Not even the company's outside directors have escaped the reeducation process: Venable recently asked several of them to attend Crosby's Quality College.
Tom Venable, for his part, is happy with the results, despite the difficulties. "In our first quarter of Quality Response Process operation," says Venable, "we've seen a 75% reduction in sales returns and allowances; if you annualize that, you're looking at savings of something like $767,000." Even more telling is Spectrum's profit-sharing balance. Believing that employees should have a fiscal, as well as a psychological, incentive to get involved in the program, Venable earmarked about half of the savings realized for the company's profit-sharing plan. Last year, management had put $150,000 into the program, but, high on quality, had budgeted $525,000 this year. Now, observes Venable," We have the feeling that it's going to be quite a bit higher -- more like $1 million-plus."
Best of all, maybe, Ed Leofskymay finally be able to stop worring about solderability. On March 12, 1985, 13 out of 14 lots of the tubular capacitors passed incoming inspection, and that level of quality has held steady ever since. On March 18, Leofsky sat down and wrote another memo: "We offer you and your team congratulations for the tremendous progress that has been made."
"Life here is a lot more pleasant these days," he adds with a smile.
