What should you share with every early-career engineer you know?
A very smart and eager young engineer I was mentoring asked me to review a drawing. They had specified extremely tight tolerances across the board. With a short conversation, I completely re-shaped their understanding of the role of the design engineer.
Me: “Why are these tolerances so tight?” / A: “I want the best part we can get.”
Me: “But what tolerances are necessary for the part to perform its function without issues?” / A: “I don’t know.”
Me: “Can any suppliers achieve the tolerances you have specified?” / A: “I haven’t checked.”
I explained that the goal in designing any component was to make it perform flawlessly at the best cost and with the surest supply. Overly tight specifications would make it harder to find suppliers who could make the part and would drive up costs.
After that interaction, their entire approach changed. They were diligent with tolerance stack studies and simulations to determine the loosest tolerances that would still get the job done. As they say, “Anybody can make it work, it takes an engineer to make it work on a budget.”
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Over the years we’ve been exposed to Six Sigma, Juran, Deming PDCA, 8D, Dale Carnegie, A3, Shainin, and more. Each technique works pretty well, and has been demonstrated many times in a wide variety of industries and circumstances. At the core they are all essentially the same!
Each approach relies on an underlying logical flow that goes like this: [a] make sure the problem is clearly defined; [b] be open to all sources of information; [c] vet the information for relevance and accuracy; [d] use the process of elimination to narrow down all possible causes to the most likely few; [e] prove which of the suspects is really the cause of the issue; [f] generate a number of potential solutions; [g] evaluate the effectiveness, feasibility and risk of the potential solutions; [h] implement the winning solution(s); and [i] take steps to make sure your solution(s) don’t unravel in the future.
The differences between the paradigms resides in supplementary steps and toolkits. For example, 8D contains the important “In
Your team is marching through the tools of your company's chosen problem-solving approach. This is time not spent on growing your business or delivering cost reductions. Yet your customers are suffering, and they're not shy about letting you know it! Why isn't it working?
Does your team struggle to deliver the kind of rapid and effective problem-solving your business requires? Can you really afford the unhappy customers, wasted engineering hours, cost of poor quality, and lost opportunities? Use the Visual 8D™ / Visual CAPA™ approach by CAEDENCE.
