MESSAGE FROM THE EDUCATION CHAIR

"Member Supply Chain Stories"

Section Members & Honored Eavesdroppers,

Our membership meeting this month went well on implementing Lean into the supply chain by Steve Ebbing.  The end of the meeting was dedicated to member reported stories, both horror and success.  Members were highly motivated to report on their experiences in part because those experiences had emotional ties, and in part because Steve was rewarding each reporter with a sample of last year's Halloween candy ... although he denies it.  

Here's a summary of those stories.  

Member reported supplier success stories

• Teaming with suppliers:  very positive formal customer-supplier team experience

• Reducing the number of suppliers:  positive affects from simplification

• Set tooling to split limits:  positive results by targeting statistical nominal as opposed to drawing tolerance inspection

• Share own expertise with suppliers:  positive results from periodic story sharing / communication events

• Understand own goals; align suppliers:  positive results through goal sharing with the supply chain

Member reported supplier horror stories

• Engineering selects suppliers:  Negative results when suppliers are selected to meet short term Engineers needs without considering long term manufacturing needs. 

• Management plans for failure:  Negative results by planning for failure as opposed to planning for success with backup options.

• Undetected upstream supplier changes:  Negative results by not considering how to control the entire value stream.  Changes made at a sub-tier supplier affected a customer four tiers up. 

• Lack of communication with suppliers:  Very negative results that simple communication could have prevented

• Not capturing all the variation from a supplier in the process validation:  Very costly negative results from a supplier that had seasonal changes in a water source that wasn’t captured in the pharmaceutical product process validation. 

Current Educational Course Status

• The CSQE, CQE and CQA refresher courses are all coming to a close very soon.  See details on our refresher course page.

• National University's survey was well responded to with over 217 responses.  We've asked them to report on the results in next month's education newsletter.       

Other Announcements

• The San Diego Quality Conference committee is in need of volunteers.  Please contact our Chair Doug McCloskey if you are a member who can help out. 

• Our section research project with the San Diego County Office of Emergency Services in an effort to address the repetitive problem of wildfire in San Diego needs more volunteers.  Contact our chair Doug McCloskey. The commitment is about 2 hours per month. Additionally, committee members receive 0.125 Recertification Credits per month for being on the committee.  Please contact Doug McCloskey at dm@grantrothbard.com  for further info and to join the committee."

• New rates for early RSVPs for membership meeting are $5.00 Discount plus 1 extra raffle tickets.  Also that another color of the ticket will be given to people who are eating dinner. Early RSVP's are considered more than one week before the meeting.  

• Several new jobs have recently been posted on our jobs page at http://www.asqsandiego.org/jobs.htm ... and keep sending them in.  

• Don't forget to check out our sponsor pages.  Great courses and products being offered!!  See links at the bottom of this email.   

• Don't forget to check out other local events on our local event calendar. 

Sincerely,

Dave Clinard 

Education Committee Chair

ASQ Section 0703 

This month we are highlighting: 

"Does DOE Require a Stable Process?"

by John J. Flaig, Ph.D.

Many respected scholars have suggested that process control is necessary (e.g., Deming, Ryan, and Wheeler) whereas other equally respected scholars have stated just the opposite (e.g., Fisher, Box, Bisgaard, Vining, and Montgomery).  Bisgaard's article in Quality Engineering [Bisgaard, 2008] entitled "Must a Process be in Statistical Control before Conducting Designed Experiments?" argues that R.A. Fisher settled the issue in 1925 when he published a paper showing that DOE is able to extract meaningful inferences from systems that were not in a state of statistical control.

  "Tool: Assignable Cause Log" 

Found on the National ASQ site

36kb MS Word File

Use this tool when monitoring process measures to document out-of-control situations. Maintain a separate log for each Control Plan measure and keep the log with the associated process measure in a place where it is accessible to employees.