Who Are Your Problem Solvers?

In a manufacturing company, it's a common situation to be faced with a tough quality problem. One that is proving difficult to resolve. All manufacturers deal with these types of problems and unfortunately, so do their customers. When a problem isn't getting resolved, it starts to look more and more complex. It rarely ever is. What makes it appear complex is that the root cause(s) is just out of reach.

Quality problems consume far too much of a company's profit. Therefore, the problem solvers need to be the best and brightest in your company. And they need to possess the right skills. In manufacturing, there are many sources of variation affecting each and every process from start to finish. Zeroing in on which one, or few, is causing the problem is seldom easy.

Problem solving teams often include the people who developed the product. Scientists, engineers and technologists in product development have remarkable skills in product design but those are not the same skills required to understand why a portion of products underperformed in testing. Those are particular analytical skills. Statistical thinking is a good place to start. Then, throw in a few statistical methods. Probably quite a few. Sampling methods, confirmation methods and techniques to separate signals from noise.

So I think that the team needs to include someone who possesses these skills already. From my experience, a good quality engineer, six sigma black belt, industrial statistician or experienced data scientist would be a suitable addition to your problem solving team. If you do not have such a person in your company, you should take your top talent and develop their problem solving skills.

In the absence of the right skillset, we tend to brainstorm in a manner that categorizes all of the guesses from the team. Then we investigate these guesses though data searches and occasionally running tests. But it's still guesswork and it isn't successful often enough.

I've worked as an industrial problem solver for many years and have put together some really good lessons.

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