Jidoka Archives - Dumontis

QRQC: Quick Response Quality Control at Valeo

Recently, Michel Baudin wrote a brief post on Quick Response Quality Control or QRQC on his site and posted it also on LinkedIn. He thereby invited practitioners to further contribute to the knowledge on QRQC, among which myself. As I feel a brief answer on LinkedIn would not do justice to the richness of QRQC, I decided to dedicate a post to the topic. Without ambition, however, to try and be complete in this post, which I feel is not possible with a vast topic like QRQC. But let’s dive in and share some of my experiences with and views on QRQC, the way I experienced and lived it at Valeo at the time.
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Problem Detection: If Only Parts Could Talk

I often hear that it’s far more challenging to develop Lean thinking in a service environment than it is in a manufacturing environment. Particularly where it is a person, and not a part, that journeys through the process. “People are not cars”, is an often-heard argument against the use of Lean principles in such service environments. The funny thing is that, to drive the point of problem detection home in manufacturing, I exactly compare manufacturing to service and healthcare processes and why, in fact, manufacturing may suffer a serious disadvantage, namely, parts don’t talk!
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Delivering upon the Promise of Kanban

Kanban implementations are often disappointing and short lived. Companies are promised better service, lower inventories and level demand. But more often the system is abandoned after a short period as it has turned the shop floor into chaos… What went wrong? (more…)

The Quality Department is Dead, Long Live the Quality Department!

“Is it really true, that we do not add any value?” People in supportive functions pose me this question quite regularly. Recently it was someone from the quality department that confronted me with this question. Coincidentally or not, the quality department plays a role in each of the three Lean initiatives that I currently accompany. All of the quality departments involved are experiencing a change in the role they play as a result of the Lean transformation their organization as a whole is going through. In anticipation of the answer to the question: although I don’t think it is the right question to ask, yes, from a Lean point of view the quality department does not add value to the product. Not even when the customer has asked for it specifically and is willing to pay for it… (more…)

Lessons for Lean E-tailing

It was my birthday last week and my almost 80 year old father had been so kind to offer me some book certificates of bol.com (comparable to amazon.com). The certificates, however, could only be converted into e-books. Bol.com’s Customer Service confirmed to me it was impossible to exchange the certificates into traditional books. In the end I succeeded, but I don’t want to deprive my readers from the lessons learned for Lean e-tailing. (more…)