Diets and Foundry Quality

I’ve been trying to lose weight again. As I’ve been going through the process, it struck me how similar weight control and foundry quality control are. How can watching your weight be like getting quality castings from a foundry? Let me explain some similarities.

 

One thing you notice when dieting is that the most common ads on television are for products that will help you gain weight. However, coming a close second are all the plans to help you lose weigh. There are the Atkins Plan, Weight Watchers, the South Beech diet, the grapefruit diet, fasting, Slim Fast, and the list goes on and on. Each has people testifying they work.

It's just like quality. Through the years, I’ve heard that many, many quality plans work extremely well. I’ve heard the KMS System, SPC, Total Quality, ISO, the Baldridge Criteria, Six Sigma and many more plans that have straightened out operations.

Unfortunately, just as I can personally attest to a number of diet plans that didn’t work, I’ve also seen all of the quality plans fail. Who hasn’t seen operations that have the excellent documentation required by ISO, but don’t seem to have the practices to back them up?

Why something works in one place and not some place else is another similarity of dieting and quality plans. The success of both depends on the belief and diligence of the person in charge and his ability to communicate it into action. If, as the boss, you don’t believe all the requirements of a particular quality plan are necessary, the likelihood is that you won’t be able to convince your people to pursue the plan diligently, and it will fail. If I can’t believe that the way for me to live is to eat grapefruit two to three times a day, I’m not going to stick with that diet. (Would you believe it lasted about 16 hours for me?)

Let’s face it, whether it’s losing weight or making sure we produce quality castings, we have to do things we’d rather not do and not do some things we’d really like to do. It’s great to be able to shoot-from-the-hip on the decisions about what it will take to make a good casting, but if you don’t do the homework, sooner or later you’re going to be in trouble.  Who likes checking to make sure things are still in calibration? If you don’t, it’ll bite you. It’s great to be able to eat anything and everything I want without wasting my time exercising, but that’s why I’m trying to lose weight again.

The real similarity between quality and dieting is what happens after you’ve been successful. We’re all familiar with the term yoyo dieters. (You did notice that I’m trying to lose weight again.)  I’ve been associated with a number of foundries that have dug themselves out of problems by installing and effectively implementing good quality plans. They’ve gone from what I considered to be poor operations to good operations. Unfortunately, I’ve also seen many of them slip back to being poor operations. The same thing happens to the foundry as happens to the dieter. Things are fine so we don’t believe we have to follow all those rules we established to make things better. Pretty soon, we’re back in trouble again.

With both the diets and quality, if you’re going to maintain what you want, you’re going to have to stick to what got you where you wanted. Both are frequently boring and require discipline, but the results are certainly worth the effort.

One big difference between quality programs and diets is the ease in which you can tell you’re in trouble. I climb on a scale, and it’s pretty easy to tell I’m going the wrong way. There are ways of telling you’re not following your quality program, but they are usually not as easy as stepping on a scale. You have to do the checking. Unfortunately, just as avoiding the scale is one the first things that happens when you go off the diet, those checks of a foundry’s quality are the first thing to go when a foundry believes it doesn’t have to work that hard to keep its quality. Of course, if they don’t perform those checks, their customers may tell them by asking for their patterns. 

So, the next time you see someone who you feel should be watching their weight (hopefully, not me), think about your quality program.  Are you getting lax on those things that you did in order to have a good quality program?