Our production people say that SPC just gets in the way and holds thing up. How can I persuade them otherwise?
A / There are three ways of running any process a) leaving it to run regardless without any adjustment; b) continually adjusting; or c) adjusting when its necessary. a) costs money. It either assumes that the process is perfect, which is unlikely, or that it is not perfect and will produce faults, but that Inspection will catch these faults. If either of these were true then there wouldn’t be a quality control industry. Too often, production are separated from the customer and their fault reporting – until it is too late. b) costs even more money. Variation in processes is what causes problems and is what needs to be controlled. Every time you fiddle with a process you add variation. Often this is done without knowing how the process is actually running; being guesswork, this can make it worse. In any case it slows the process and means you are not making best use of your resources. This should appeal to production management who are measured by the efficiency with which they produce.
