I was just thinking about the often-observed contradictions among quality assurance, quality control, and production. My production experience was as a laboratory technician with two German companies, one of which had an Italian subsidiary. The differences were striking. Although in both German companies I had little to do with production managers, the Italian production manager visited us lab guys many times a day.

All the companies managed continuously running production processes that, once set up, would run for weeks and need nothing more than periodical monitoring. So why did the Italian production manager have to continually bother us in the lab for more than routine checks?

Was he insecure? Probably so.

As I found in many companies I audited, the production manager was “built” out of the most clever line operator. My guess is that having neither education nor experience about how to control the processes he was now responsible for, this production manager tended to rely on the quality control lab to help him out.

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