In praise of Design Reviews

Posted on 9 May 2010 by

I worked in one of the large Cambridge-based technology consultancies for many years and was privileged to have clients from small, inexperienced start-ups to large, established mature enterprises. Sometimes we developed products from scratch but sometimes we were brought in late in the day to sort out a client’s project that had gone wrong.

One of the key tools that we used was the formal design review. We used it during complete product developments – it was an integral part of our ISO 9001 processes and we were trained how to do it – but it was of even greater benefit when we were parachuted in to rescue a project.

I have used the same technique with clients ever since.

However clever the designers, however sophisticated the design, this approach finds bugs. Peer-reviewing new designs before you commit a lot of time and money can be hugely beneficial in preventing problems further downstream… if done properly.

Process

Your people will naturally be capable of finding design weaknesses if given the opportunity, environment and culture that encourages them to do so, even if – especially if – they aren’t personally involved in that part of the design.

The review is done by a selected group by peers (colleagues) from different disciplines; electronic engineers, mechanical engineers, system architects, manufacturing people, software experts, etc, under the chairmanship of an experienced reviewer not the designer/s themselves. The timing of the review is usually set by project management but is typically at a point in the project where a significant commitment of time, money or risk is about to be made e.g. release of design details into prototype manufacturing.

For a complex design the requirements specification, functional specification and the design documentation should be circulated in advance so the attendees can spend time understanding it and assessing it for themselves. The design review meeting then reviews and challenges these findings.

For a simple design, or an iteration, the findings can usually be derived on-the-fly during the meeting itself.

In both instances the meeting decides on the relative importance of the findings and identifies the actions that needs to be taken. These are documented in a meeting note or minutes, and the actions are progressed to a conclusion through project or line management.

Check List

To help guide the review, give it structure, and avoid omitting key questions, I have always found it beneficial to use a detailed checklist. This is added to over time so that it becomes a ‘superset’ of all possible questions. Many will be not applicable for any given circumstance so can be omitted, but it’s a way to avoid leaving anything out; it captures best practice for your products and industry.

There isn’t room here to reproduce a generic checklist – in any case it should be bespoke to you and your business – but, for illustration, I would expect an electronic or electro-mechanical checklist to cover:

Specifications, risks, safety-critical areas, design fail-safes, use of unproven technologies or new design techniques.

Schematic design: Gate and bus loading, I/O loading and protection, devices within Safe Operating Areas, production tolerancing, PSU monitoring / watchdogs, high current or voltage designs, spare IC pins (especially inputs), timing and synchronisation.
Thermal effects, heat generated and heat dissipation, power distribution. Design for Manufacture / Test / Environment / EMC. FMEA. Product costing. Production test design and coverage. PCB layout rules, RF design constraints, lay-ups, design for EMC, test points, mechanical interfaces, component sourcing.

Software / firmware design and prototyping, BITE, software to test hardware at different stages, GUI design, interoperability and standards compliance. ASIC design, timing analysis, hardware and/or software simulation. Industrial Design, mechanical design, tolerancing, tooling, robustness or life testing, mechanism optimisation, stress testing, HALT / HASS, pressure relief, fluid handling…
…and so on (the full checklist asks much more detailed questions, of course).

I suggest that you draw up a checklist specific to your own products and technologies, then evolve the list over time on the basis of experience and as a Corrective Action if you find that design shortcomings have slipped through its safety net.

In any case, it isn’t the list itself that’s important, it’s the things that going through the list – and asking questions of each other in a constructive way – brings up.

And, as a bonus, it’s a very effective way of addressing ISO 9001 Section 7.3.4.

They don’t like it…

Instinctively, some design engineers don’t like this process. If not done well they can feel like they are under unfair pressure or criticism. I had one engineer say to me recently “it was a waste of time, most questions were irrelevant, it took too long”. “Sorry to hear that”, I replied, “so you didn’t find anything that could be improved?” “Oh yes, we spotted some things we definitely needed to change…”

QED!

The fix for their reluctance? Make it constructive not critical, make it relevant, show how effective it can be as a design safety-net, and make them part of developing the process so they are passing on their experience and knowledge to others.

By finding and fixing the design shortcomings and risks at this stage you can prevent hugely expensive field failures or product recalls; I suspect that, given their recent experience, Toyota wish they had done better design reviews…

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More ‘Snickers’ than Marathon…

Posted on 3 May 2010 by

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Windsurfing4CancerResearch, Grafham Water 2 May 2010

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Gosh that was hard…

After a month of lovely warm, dry weather, the day of the Sunrise Sunset event dawned with the thermometer well under 10 degrees C, heavy rain and blustery winds. Lovely!

Although only 15 of us were participating at Grafham, there were over 200 windsurfers across the UK all trying to raise money for the cancer charity. Everyone had their own goals; mine were 50 miles if the weather was grotty or 100 if it was great. I think we can safely say it fell into the grotty category…

We knew that however fast we went in a straight line the corners would slow us down; we had to do long straight runs. There was a big national dinghy sailing event at Grafham – 300 teenagers in little ‘Topper’ boats – so the windsurfers’ strategy was to get out early and clock up as many miles as we could before the lake got boat-logged and we were stuck in a corner. We took to the water at 9am with the dinghies due out at 10.30.

Within a few minutes I found the first problem. Yes, I could get up a decent speed but as soon as I hit the corner it all went pear-shaped. I could turn the board OK but when I grabbed the mast or boom on the other side I couldn’t grip it – my hands were too cold, so the sail just pulled itself out of my hands and I went for a little swim.

clip_image006 That was the pattern for the first hour and a half – blast along for a mile at something over 20mph then have a little swim for a few minutes. And again. And again.

The wind was very up and down. Sometimes it would go from a hardly-moving-at-all-5mph to a rip-the-sail-out-of-your-hands-30mph in just a second or two… or the reverse. Very difficult conditions as I could never settle on the board, I was continually moving around trying to get some control. The driving rain was stinging my face and hands so it was difficult to see as I had my eyes half shut!

Two and a half hours gone, wind dropping, time to come in and change to a larger board and sail; this might help to reduce my swimming time as it will give me longer to persuade my hands to work. Well, it was a good theory…

The wind decided to get back up again with a vengeance. clip_image008
The board was hardly controllable, I was bouncing all over the place as the water was really rough. I was limping into the beach almost completely out of control when the board and sail just got ripped out of my hands and thrown downwind. Oh great! The problem then was that the wind blew my kit away quicker than I could swim. I got tantalisingly close but then it went again. So I had a happy half hour swim to the bank. Hang on, I thought this was a windsurfing marathon, how come it has turned into a triathlon without so much as a by-your-leave?

OK, so I’m covered in mud but at least I’ve got the kit back. Limp across to the beach for a very necessary break. Pasta and soup although I couldn’t finish it. Too cold; starting to shiver continuously, even after diving – wetsuit-clad – into a hot shower. Not a good sign!

So I had a long break and that was probably a bad idea as it was all downhill from then on; longer breaks, shorter time on the water. I was completely shattered; I’d go out feeling OK but within 5 minutes I was falling off repeatedly and didn’t have the energy to get going properly. I know what the marathon runners mean by ‘hitting the wall’. You get into a vicious cycle of making a silly mistake, falling off, struggling to get going, making more mistakes, falling off again, etc.

clip_image010The wind was, by now, gusting like before but with very vicious strong peaks of more than 30mph. I had started on a 7.2m sail, changed up to 8.5m, gone back down to 7.2, and now rigged a 6.0 on a small board. It was very quick in the gusts but I’ve never really liked the 6.0, it doesn’t ‘rotate’ properly when you change direction, so each turn was accompanied by having to kick the sail, with my foot, at about chest-height to get it to rotate. Not exactly the best way to stay upright so, yes, it did add to the swimming and cursing tally more than somewhat.

I could only manage about half an hour without a break or I risked not being able to get back into the beach at all. I couldn’t stand the ignominy of being rescued! I hadn’t so much ‘hit the wall’ as run into it headlong and had it collapse down all over me!

But gradually, in little slow chunks, I ate into the 50 mile target. The dinghies had, by now, abandoned racing as the weather was much too vIMG_3690_modicious so we had the whole lake to ourselves again. Back to my large board with the 7.2m sail and 2 mile runs across the whole length of the lake to haul in the 50 mile target. And by late in the afternoon I got there; just over 51 miles when I got back to the beach!

I don’t think I could have gone another hundred yards, but I made it. Some windsurfers did less, some did more, but given the conditions, the cold, the numbness of the hands, the swimming, the exhaustion, the lack of fitness despite hours in the gym, I thought that 50 was OK for an unfit old git of 55 with little windsurfing ability!

Total distance covered = 51.2 miles

Top speed recorded = 28mph, although my average speed was clearly a lot lower than that!

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Calories burnt over 8 hours = 4600 (although I really can’t recommend it as a viable diet). Maximum heart rate = 162. Average heart rate, over the whole 8 hours = 122.

But, most importantly, money raised for cancer research = £250 (and about £15,000 in total by everyone participating in the event across the country).

clip_image016If you feel moved by my efforts, however humble, and feel that you can contribute just a little to Cancer Research, please visit http://www.justgiving.com/tom-gaskell

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Quality is a strategic issue

Posted on 27 April 2010 by

I’d like to take an overview of what quality is… and why it’s strategically important to your business.

What is Quality?

Quality means meeting requirements. It isn’t about providing more features, or complexity, or performance that increases cost, takes longer to provide or makes it more difficult to use and may not be required. A good quality product or service or business process, in the words of Ronseal, “does exactly what it says on the tin”.

The business leader and academic Peter Drucker explains that “Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for. A product is not quality because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money, as manufacturers typically believe. This is incompetence. Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality.“

The quality guru W. Edwards Deming tells us “quality is everyone’s responsibility” but, of course, it needs leadership and example-setting from the top as nothing will undermine a quality improvement initiative more than management paying lip-service to the initiative whilst not following it themselves.

Quality needs to become part of the organisational culture and part of the product lifecycle; it needs to be built into the product from the start, it isn’t something that can be ‘sprayed on’ later. It has to be automatic and implicit; as Henry Ford said, “quality means doing it right when no one is looking.”

A huge benefit of improving quality is that you can save both time and money by producing quality products in a quality way – keeping things consistent and simple, doing the work correctly once rather than badly several times, and not wasting money or development time.

A Quality Strategy

I believe that quality should be a critical part of a company’s strategy. Quality of product and of business operations is key to satisfying customer needs and expectations and also to a company’s success and profitability.

Philip Crosby’s Quality Management Maturity Grid gives some very clear pointers as to the goals for quality. His most advanced stage of quality management has six preventive, consistent and assured characteristics:

Management understanding and attitude: Consider quality management an essential part of the company system.

Quality organisation status: Quality manager on board of directors. Prevention is main concern. Quality is a thought leader.

Problem handling: Except in the most unusual cases, problems are prevented.

Cost of Quality as % of sales: Reported 2.5%; actual 2.5% (i.e. the company knows exactly what the CoQ is, and it is very low).

Quality improvement actions: Quality improvement is a normal and continued activity.

Summary of company quality posture: “We know why we do not have problems with quality.”

Few companies match all of these characteristics but Crosby’s approach can help you develop a strategic quality route-map to move in the right direction.

So what should you include in your Quality Strategy? Here are some suggestions, in no particular order:

  • What are your customers’ quality requirements and expectations? How can you work together with your customers to improve quality rather than rely on the traditional supplier/buyer relationship?
  • What recognised industry quality standards do you need to have? What do your competitors offer? How can you ‘punch above your weight’ and gain strategic advantage in a crowded marketplace through improved quality?
  • What quality management standards will you adopt – ISO 9001? TL 9000? TickIT? Good Manufacturing Practice? Etc. How will you ensure these really benefit the company and are not merely badges? If you are simply going it alone, how will you ensure that you adopt best practice?
  • Quality ownership and management; who will provide leadership and management and continuous improvement in this area? How will you train your staff to contribute to quality? Who will devise and improve your operational processes and systems, and how?
  • Preventive Action processes and escalation paths; how do you prevent things going wrong before they cause you a problem? Philip Crosby says that “quality has to be caused, not controlled”. How are you going to design inherent quality and reliability into your products and services?
  • Corrective Action processes and escalation paths; what do you do when things go wrong and how do you make sure the problems have really been fixed and the lessons learnt?
  • Measurement and feedback; what are your quality Key Performance Indicators, what actions will you take to meet them, how will these change over time? What levels of defects on delivery, or in warranty, are acceptable – 5%? 1%? Zero Defects?
  • How can you ensure that your supply chain manages quality to your expectations? How can you work with your suppliers to improve quality rather than rely on the traditional buyer/supplier relationship?
  • And consider how the strategy will change – and how your quality will be continuously improved – over time.

Quality is Free

Improved quality does not need to be a cash-drain on the company. It should not slow things down or make things more difficult. In fact, the converse; business management expert Tom Peters tells us that “almost all quality improvement comes via simplification of design, manufacturing… layout, processes, and procedures.“

Philip Crosby’s book ‘Quality is Free’ is based on the premise that, by improving quality, you can save far more than you spend doing it; it can directly lead to increased profits. He explains that, if you don’t yet analyse and understand it, your Cost of Quality is probably around 20% of your turnover; possibly more than your margin. Even if you do analyse it, you are very possibly under-valuing it by several percentage points.

In many companies there is, therefore, a huge opportunity for improvement. The most quality-mature organisations know what quality really costs and can drive it down to below 5%. Can you afford not to improve quality?

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Prevention is better than cure

Posted on 13 April 2010 by

Many moons ago I was blogging about Corrective Actions and said that, whilst they were invaluable, taking Preventive Actions was even better, as it should stop the problems occurring in the first place, but is considerably more difficult!

I thought I should elaborate…

It is obviously more difficult to say whether it will rain tomorrow than to say if it is raining now. For Preventive Actions you are trying to predict future problems so that you can take action to prevent them occurring.

A number of preventive techniques are available for incorporating into your normal working practices on a regular planned basis – say monthly or quarterly – or at key stages of projects; make them part of the way you do business. The techniques include:

FMEA / PFMEA

Failure Mode and Effects Analysis, or it’s process equivalent, is a well established technique for identifying what might go wrong with a product or a design or a process, what the probability is and what the consequence would be if it did go wrong. You can then look at the most damaging and take preventive action, perhaps by changing the design or process parameters.

Risk Analysis / Risk Reviews

A little like FMEA, risk management involves looking at where the risks are in an activity (such as an R&D project) and their likelihood of occurrence and impact. Once you have carefully evaluated what might go wrong you can devise mitigating actions to reduce their likelihood or impact. FMEA is really part of risk management, as are activities like Health and Safety and Fire Risk assessments.

SPC trend analysis

I blogged about Statistical Process Control last October and it is highly relevant to preventive techniques. At its heart lies the Process Chart, data that shows the variation in parameters and enables you to get processes under control. SPC helps to spot trends in data that aren’t causing current problems but, if left unchecked, could lead to future problems.

Customer satisfaction trend analysis

Just as SPC can tell you if your manufacturing processes are starting to drift out of control before they actually go out of spec, customer satisfaction monitoring can spot emerging discontent before it needs a knee-jerk reaction. Do you know what your customers really think about you? Are any of them becoming less content? Do you need to do something about it?

HALT

‘Highly Accelerated Life Testing’ works on the basis that high stresses applied for a short time will cause the same failures as low stresses over a long time. By applying increasing amounts of stress to a product you can reveal hidden shortcomings in the design which you can iteratively improve until they are no longer weaknesses; see my blog about HALT (June 2009).

Design Reviews

My old friend Nick Goy (sadly no longer with us) was a no-nonsense technology consultant who pooh-poohed management fads but was absolute master of the design review; he taught the rest of us how it should be done. Whenever he went to help new clients he did a formal design review; however clever the designers, however sophisticated the design, Nick would find the bugs. You can do the same, peer reviewing new designs before you commit a lot of time and money can be hugely beneficial in preventing problems further downstream if done properly.

Design For Manufacture

DFM aims to optimise a product’s manufacturability. Instead of designing the product first then working out a way to manufacture it, you start by optimising the production and test processes that are repeated hundreds or thousands of times then make the design (which you only do once) fit with them. It’s a great discipline to build in to your processes. Production Tolerancing (including techniques such as Monte-Carlo Analysis) is one of the best known but, too often, least well applied parts of DFM.

Poka-Yoke

We had to get a Japanese buzz-phrase in somewhere! It’s a method for ‘mistake-proofing’ a process so that it can’t be implemented incorrectly through lack of skill or concentration or random error. For instance, you might ‘key’ connectors so that only the correct combinations fit together, or you might safety-interlock doors so they cut power when a door is opened, or provide assembly jigs so that components can only be fitted the right way round. Poka-Yoke is a ‘fail-safe’ technique.

…and I haven’t even touched on Product or Service Readiness Reviews, Preventive Maintenance, Competitor and Market Analysis, Lessons Learnt exercises, and a host of other valid preventive approaches.

Preventive Action is difficult to justify with a conventional cost/benefit analysis because how do you know what would have happened if you hadn’t used it? But if the alternative is simply to wait for problems to strike, then react when they do, you can see how taking Preventive Action can be attractive.

The quality gurus say that if you rely purely on corrective (Quality Control) techniques rather than preventive ones (Quality Assurance) you will suffer from problems that are expensive and damaging but can never be completely eliminated; a sort of ‘background radiation of quality problems’ that keep you in fire-fighting mode.

So, over the next few weeks, my plan is to expand on some of these techniques; I hope you will find the blogs interesting or, at least, a little thought-provoking.

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Windsurfing 4 Cancer Research

Posted on 11 April 2010 by

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It seemed like a good idea to contribute to the 2010  Windsurfing 4 Cancer Research event, having lost both an uncle and a friend to the disease recently and with a member of the family currently undergoing treatment.

And yes it will be cold and knackering but it wouldn’t mean as much if it was easy, would it? The most I’ve sailed in a day is round Hayling or round Mersea or round Rutland which I guess is about 30 miles so it should be easy enough to beat that; I’d like to do 50, or even 100 miles if my dodgy back holds up. (Victoria the Osteopath is lined up for the Monday…)

If you feel like donating through JustGiving it’s simple, fast and secure: http://www.justgiving.com/tom-gaskell

Your details are safe – they’ll never sell them on or send unwanted emails. Once you donate, they’ll send your money directly to the charity and make sure Gift Aid is reclaimed on every eligible donation by a UK taxpayer. So if you can spare even a small amount it would be hugely appreciated. Thanks

Tom

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Postscript: 2 hours of practice yesterday showed how rusty I am! It’s 10 years since I was last on a long raceboards and it showed in my complete incompetence. 50 miles will be a challenge! At least I didn’t fall in – the water is very cold at this time of year – and to my great surprise I can actually walk today.

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Hong Kong and Shenzhen

Posted on 5 April 2010 by

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I’ve just returned from a very interesting visit to a Contract Electronics Manufacturer in Shenzhen, China. Many of the things I have blogged about recently were clearly demonstrated including rigorous application of the 5S methodology along with good SPC and TQM – it was a good quality manufacturer and we were made very welcome.

We had an interesting demonstration of Hawthorne and Heisenberg in practice, though – we were investigating the root cause for some settings of some products occasionally having errors. Product configuration is a manual process, and the instructions up on the wall next to the test station were flawed – there was a minor error in the document which the operators knew about and corrected as they entered the data. However, we have occasionally seen products with that specific parameter set incorrectly; unsurprisingly, despite their thoroughness a small number or errors do occur.

However, a different error appeared when the final tests were done; one product exhibited a new type of fault. When we pushed for the root cause, the operator admitted that he was nervous because of our presence and made a mistake.

It was fascinating to see Hawthorne and Heisenberg demonstrated so clearly; as ‘experimenters’ we were directly affecting the experiment; had we not been there he would not have been nervous and the results would have been different.

The fix for both types of error was to correct the instructions then automate the process so the operator was taken out of the loop; the configuration settings are now made via software so it doesn’t matter if operators are nervous in the presence of visitors or not!

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Is the Hawthorne Effect really just Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle for the common man?

Posted on 27 March 2010 by

The Hawthorne Effect was first described by psychology researcher Henry Landsberger in the fifties when he analysed work done decades earlier at Western Electric’s Hawthorn Works near Chicago.

Western Electric ran a study to see if its workers would become more productive if the light levels were raised. This did indeed happen, there was a significant increase in productivity when the lighting in the workplace was made brighter, even if only a little bit brighter, although after some time productivity gradually dropped again.

So the experimenters reduced the light levels again by the same amount they had originally put them up.

I suspect you’re ahead of me on this one… when the light levels were reduced the productivity went up again!

This has become known as the Hawthorne Effect – people who are being studied improve their performance simply because they are being studied; someone is measuring them, assessing them, taking an interest in them, or otherwise giving them unusual attention, and it makes them change their behaviour.

It’s a bit like driving a car when a policeman is following you – you become really careful and precise in your use of the mirror, indicators, lane discipline, and so on!

The Hawthorne Effect doesn’t just apply to lighting; far from it. It applies to many changes or initiatives such as improved cleanliness or workplace layout (5S), new working methods and processes, changed organisational structures, training and development, TQM programmes, and a host of other things that management does to try to improve productivity.

So why do I mention Heisenberg?

In quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle explains how certain pairs of physical properties of subatomic particles cannot be known at the same time. So, for instance, if you know an electron’s position you can’t know its velocity and vice versa. Some scientists say this is a fundamental characteristic of nature, it simply isn’t possible to know both things at the same time; this is where quantum mechanics becomes rather surreal for the layman!

However, for others scientists it is more an indication of the effect that the experimenter has on the experiment – the act of measuring velocity means that you destroy the information about its position, and if you do an experiment that determines the electron’s position at a moment in time then the information about its velocity is lost.

In other words, the observers contaminate the experiment; their presence affects the outcome. That is what happens with the Hawthorne Effect.

It also has a something in common with the Placebo Effect in which, if a patient simply believes they are receiving a certain type of medication or treatment, their medical conditions improve, even if the medication or treatment is a dummy that can be shown to have no effect on the condition being treated.

So what does all this have to do with your management or quality improvement initiatives? Well, it means that you may want to adopt a sceptical attitude towards your results.

You should be making changes and evaluating the result as part of your philosophy of Continuous Improvement but, when you do so, ask yourself if the improvements are not so much because of what you have done, but simply that you have done something.

Keep an eye on those results; if they drop back when you stop paying them as much attention, you may be experiencing the Hawthorne Effect.

The late Sir John Harvey-Jones said “Management is not about the preservation of the status quo. It is about maintaining the highest rate of change that the organisation and the people within it can stand”. Maybe one benefit of this potentially disruptive strategy is that you ride the wave of the Hawthorne Effect; if people are frequently having the right sort of attention given to them, they may raise their performance to match.

Who cares if it’s the Placebo Effect or the common man’s manifestation of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, an improvement is an improvement!

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Posted in Business quality & processes, Main Page, Manufacturing, Other | 2 Comments

5S is more than just spring cleaning

Posted on 16 March 2010 by

5S stands for Seiri, Seiton, Seiso, Seiketsu, and Shitsuke. And, by the way, despite being called 5S many people say there’s a 6th – Safety.

Well, I’m glad to have cleared that up!

Perhaps I had better explain… You have probably deduced that 5S is another Japanese-inspired approach to quality improvement; in this case it’s all about organising the workplace to be clean, tidy, efficient and safe, whether this be on the factory floor or in the office or elsewhere. This doesn’t just have financial and safety benefits but can significantly improve the sense of ownership and morale of the workforce.

The 5 S’s are Japanese words that break the process into 5 stages. It’s difficult to exactly match the Japanese stages to five English words that also start with S so, as with Kaizen and Poka-yoke, many English-speakers stay with the Japanese words. However, if you feel a desperate need to Westernise it you could try Seiri = Sort, Seiton = Set in Order (Simplify, Straighten), Seiso = Sweep (Shine), Seiketsu = Standardise, Shitsuke = Sustain… and Safety (which is self-evident).

The concept of 5S is to arrange items or activities in such a way that the flow of work is simpler, easier and more efficient. For example, workstations, desks or benches are made clean and tidy and everything needed to do the work is made easy to find, tools are placed at the point where they are used and in a way that makes them instantly available (e.g. via shadow boards or tool holders), layout of the work is arranged to avoid staff having to bend or move excessively to get at materials or tools, problems become easier to see, work processes are standardised to reduce wasted effort or wasted materials, and so on.

As a result of the tidier working space and easier to use layout, safety is improved; the sixth S is really a consequence of the first five.

This is how the five stages work:

1. Seiri – tidiness; eliminate unnecessary items

Go through the entire workplace and remove everything that isn’t wanted, used and essential to the work being done. Keep only the bare minimum and avoid ‘Just In Case’ syndrome.

2. Seiton – orderliness, find a place for everything

Set in Order; put everything in a specific, assigned place so it can be retrieved quickly and easily. Make the workflow smooth and efficient. Arrange storage where it’s required and use tool holders, shadow boards, labelling and other methods to identify where tools or other items should be kept easily to hand (and to show if they are missing).

3. Seiso – shine or clean regularly

Arrange for systematic, regular cleaning of the work area and keep it clean when you are using it; this applies to the office (how about having a clean desk policy, for instance?) just as much as to the shop floor.

4. Seiketsu – standardise the way that work is done

This stage is all about making the previous three stages stick. Standardise what you have done and how you have done it, make sure that you document the first three stages and their outcomes, and make sure everyone knows what is expected of them.

5. Shitsuke – maintain the improvements you have made

Make 5S part of your working life – “the way we do things around here”. People need to be committed to maintaining and improving the benefits achieved. The natural tendency is to let the workplace slide back into untidiness and disorganisation; staff need to overcome that tendency by regularly re-visiting the earlier stages and by sticking to the agreed processes and standards.

And now the bonus ball:

6. Safety – eliminate hazards and risks

Purists say that adding ‘Safety’ is unnecessary as, if implemented properly, the other 5S stages will result in a safe work environment. But change can bring risk and reorganising the workplace, especially one with hazardous tools or materials, even more so. It’s no bad thing to make sure that Safety is emphasised and gets serious attention (and it keeps the pedants busy pointing out that you have six Ss in your five S process!).

So yes, there is an element of spring cleaning in 5S – I do like to be topical! – but it is far more than that. There’s some Lean Thinking in 5S too and, conversely, 5S can be a useful part of Lean Transformation; regular readers of this blog will have noticed that many quality initiatives knit together quite nicely like this at the concept level.

5S may not reach the intellectual high-ground of initiatives such as Six Sigma or TQM but it’s much quicker and cheaper to implement and can really transform the working environment; it can be a quick and easy win, and I’m all for that.

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CE marking misconceptions

Posted on 28 February 2010 by

To the uninitiated, product regulatory and approvals requirements seem baffling and over-complicated beyond belief; ‘bureaucracy gone mad’.

CE marking is a prime example. Most products that are to be placed on the market in Europe need to have the familiar CE mark applied to them:

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Now, I’m not ambitious or foolish enough to provide a complete guide to CE marking in 800 words! Instead, to act as an aide-mémoire or maybe to ring a few alarm bells, here’s a list of the most common misconceptions about this subject that I and my colleagues have come across in the last few years:

1. It doesn’t apply to our products because we only sell small quantities business-to-business.

CE marking isn’t just a high volume consumer requirement, even small quantities are covered.

2. We just buy in bulk from the Far East and re-sell in Europe so we aren’t responsible for CE marking.

You are placing products on the market in Europe so you are, indeed, responsible.

3. We are giving the product away for customers to try, so CE marking is not needed.

Products don’t have to be purchased, if they are being placed in service they usually require CE marking.

4. We manufacture high numbers of different components – CE marking them all will cost us a fortune.

CE marking usually covers finished goods rather than components.

5. We don’t know what standards apply or what testing we need, so we’ll wait for someone to tell us.

Ignorance is no defence; the ‘someone’ may be authorities taking action against you!

6. We might want to change the design so we’ll wait for a while after the product has been launched, just in case

CE marking needs to be in place when you launch. (Some design changes may require an amount of re-testing or analysis but not all will.)

7. We can produce a Declaration of Conformity at first then we have 3 years in which to get it tested.

You don’t necessarily need to have the product tested but you do need to have CE marking in place from the first time you place the product on the market.

8. Our contract manufacturer will do it all.

The manufacturer may help you with documentation, testing or assessment, but it’s you – not them – that is responsible for CE marking. You sign the Declaration of Conformity.

9. The test house – or Notified Body – will do it all.

See (8). They can have a key role, but you sign things and are responsible. If you get it wrong it’s you that gets into hot water!

10. The manufacturer says he’s using lead-free solder so we conform to RoHS.

The RoHS Directive covers more than just lead (and not even lead in some circumstances), so this isn’t enough.

11. Our designers know what they are doing so we can just self-declare the product and slap CE on it.

In some circumstances this may be true, particularly for benign types of products, but don’t assume it; you may have to do more analysis or testing.

12. We’ve done Electro-Magnetic Compatibility testing so we can CE mark the product.

CE marking covers more than EMC.

13. We need to produce official certificates for RoHS, WEEE, Packaging, etc.

There aren’t official certificates for such things and there’s not even an official RoHS or Packaging Directive label you can use (WEEE does have one – the crossed out wheelie bin).

14. Once it’s tested that’s it – we pass the test and are free to sell the product.

No, there are documentation requirements, labelling requirements, Declarations of Conformity to be produced and, in some instances, third party assessment to be done.

15. We need to conform to the Low Voltage Directive because our product runs off a 9 volt battery.

That’s not what the LVD is for.

16. We’ve put the crossed-out wheelie bin sticker on the product, so we conform to WEEE.

You do need the label on the product (or its packaging) but you also need WEEE processes and registration in place.

17. We can copy the labelling off similar things we’ve bought – CE0168, UL, FCC and so on; they’ll have done their homework about what you need.

Absolutely not! You need marking that’s specific to your product, its approvals, etc; anyway, I have seen a lot of labelling errors on other people’s products…

18. We’ve done CE marking so we’re OK to sell product anywhere in Europe now.

Certain countries may have additional, more stringent, local requirements; you need to check.

19. We just have to write “CE” on the product somewhere.

No, there are rules about the size, format and location of the CE mark as well as other marking, Declarations of Conformity, etc.

20. There are three weeks to go before we launch the product so its time we looked at CE marking.

This is VERY common! Three weeks isn’t enough, it can take months so allow sufficient time.

Do any of these seem familiar or have they rung alarm bells? If so, you might want to ask some questions within your organisation, or of your suppliers, or get some expert help. And remember, this was just for Europe, other parts of the world have their own requirements.

With thanks to Chris Beecham for his contributions to the list.

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Posted in European Directives, Main Page, Product quality & reliability | 6 Comments

An Inspector Calls

Posted on 16 February 2010 by

The quality guru W. Edwards Deming once said “you can not inspect quality into the product; it is already there.”

There is a great deal of emphasis within the quality management profession on Quality Assurance (preventive techniques) rather than Quality Control (corrective techniques). Inspection, in most cases, is seen as Quality Control; in other words it is not a way of adding value but rather is a cost to the business.

Well that’s true enough – who am I to doubt Deming – but I’d like to put a little balance into the argument. Whilst Quality Assurance is a great ideal to strive for, there is often merit in doing at least some QC; inspection does still have a valid place in your quality tool-box.

Inspection can act as a safety net. Yes, Quality Assurance should be delivering high quality, Zero Defects products that you shouldn’t need to check. But suppose it doesn’t? Suppose something goes wrong? You don’t want your customers to be the first people to spot a problem, so inspection is your chance to find defects first and to fix them quickly so the faults are corrected at source.

Think of a typical problem you have had with incoming materials or parts, or finished goods produced by your company, or even with something you’ve bought for home from the high street. Did it take sophisticated, expensive, calibrated test equipment to spot a subtle defect or could you see it with just a moment’s glance? In other words, would a simple inspection have found the problem? I believe you’ll find in many cases it would have done. If I think back over my years of experience in industry this would be true for many of the defects that I have encountered – they were obvious, why did nobody find them before me?

This can make the process of inspection very cost-effective as it can be done quickly compared with some other screening techniques, such as HASS testing or soak testing, which can be very effective but can tie up expensive equipment for much longer periods.

So what do you need in order to do inspection effectively?

Well, you ought to know what your inspection criteria are. Do you have cosmetic standards? (I’m talking scratches, discolouration and misalignment, not eye-liner and lipstick!) You need to have something that determines what is visually acceptable and what is not, and this should be agreed with your suppliers to avoid the ‘is it / isn’t it good enough’ argument. You need specifications or drawings if you’re measuring things, and you might be able to use industry-wide workmanship standards such as the electronics industry’s IPC-610.

You may also need measuring and inspection tools including simple magnifiers, optical inspection systems, and so on. Digital cameras are a huge asset as ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ and you should be keeping records and metrics (Key Performance Indicators) of your inspection results so you can monitor whether quality is getting better or worse over time and do something about it.

Having a defined inspection process is also beneficial. This helps to avoid the problem of people always inspecting their own work (which can suffer from them having consistent blind spots), or missing out key things you want to have inspected, or suffering from inspection fatigue whereby a small number of defects amongst many good parts don’t get spotted at all.

If 100% inspection isn’t desirable, why not use an Acceptable Quality Limit scheme? See the my blog on AQLs from a few weeks ago.

And here’s a thought – why do inspection of incoming goods or materials at all? Get your suppliers to do the inspection and prove to you they’ve done it e.g. with a digital photo records or measurements. Apart from saving you money it shortens their own quality feedback loop and encourages them to improve quality at source.

Preventive QA, as I mentioned at the start of this piece, is usually seen as superior to Corrective QC; back to Deming who wisely said, “You are never better off after the fire department leaves than you would have been if they weren’t needed in the first place.” But that doesn’t mean we should disband the fire service or throw away our smoke detectors and rely solely on fire risk assessment. Inspection has a useful place in ensuring quality and can be highly cost-effective. Are you making the best use of it?

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Posted in Business quality & processes, Main Page, Manufacturing, Product quality & reliability | Leave a comment