Quality & Production: Too many cooks ...

Or too many inspections in this case. It's human nature. If two people are told to count the pages in a book and record the results - it's natural that if one does it before the other one, then the 2nd person might rely on the results of the 1st person.

During a review of common and frequent problems on our production lines, I believe that we have too many checks and double-checks and overlapping responsibilities between the Quality department and the Production department.

It's too easy for the production line supervisor to rely on the Quality inspector and visa-versa. It's not a true separate independent check.

Production needs to take responsibility and make sure the production line supervisors are not relying on the quality inspector to "catch" any problems. The current in-process quality inspection should actually be reduced and moved to the end of the production line.

In a recent book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, the author refers to this problem as the "broken windows theory" and sites studies where crimes witnessed by multiple observers are reported less often than crimes witnessed by one observer. With multiple observers, everybody thinks someone else will report the crime. Another recent story centered around the number of editors involved in a book publication at a major publishing house. Over the years, the organization kept adding more editors to the review process only to discover after several years that they had 11 editor reviews and errors were not reduced. Everybody thought everybody else would catch the errors.

More people is not the solution. The right person doing the job right the first time is the answer. They need to have responsibility and not rely on downstream checks and double-checks.

Get the extra cooks out of the kitchen.