Great!
I appreciate the article, written to the ground level personnel, who seem to think, that Information technology can solve all their hardcore "real" problems. But the point is how can we make Engineers like Mark, to understand that the real world is vastly different from the virtual Excel world.
Only articles like yours would make them to move in inches over a decade
Congratulations once again
I, being a Consultant, am taking the previlege of disseminating this article to my clients, with a fond hope that some of them would at least go thro them FULLY and do not dump in the trash box
Thanks

I was a 30+/- yr-old quality project manager on a processing line. We'd been spreading finish-ruining offal out our stacks onto the cars in the neighbors' parking lots, and they were getting cross.

Here, "Karl", a 50-year-old extremely competent and creative engineer played the part of your whippersnapper. He designed a monstrous but tight process enclosure that worked magnificently.

Until came the time to change electrodes. The enclosure came down as easily as it went up, which meant it wasn't easy. At all. Production's turn to be peeved. Which annoyed the engineers, which PO'd the plant manager, who came to me.

Karl and his department came to the conference room with his improvements. I pointed out an accessibility concern, one of many. Which was met with a brush-off, which I could see was going to be one of many unless I did something.

So I excused myself for a minute. I walked the 300 ft. to the line and grabbed the assistant lead, a taciturn but solid and honest fellow named "Al". I told him I wanted him to help the engineers design a better enclosure. He frowned, and the rest of his face said, "Stupid engineers. Stupid quality guys." He was going to have to shut down the line to attend the meeting, he warned ominously. I took the initiative to say yes.

To show me who was boss, Al brought half his line with him to the meeting. So there we were: five crisply-attired engineers with enough degrees to heat a tankful of water and five grubby just-plain-guys with line experience out the wazoo. And in this corner, me.

It was rocky at first. Just establishing each team's credentials with the other took several meetings. But pretty soon, we turned into one team. The drawings took shape.

But that's not the important part of the story.

One day, Karl and Al were negotiating a maintainability issue right around a large bearing. Al said they needed clearance X to get the rolls out. Karl said there was plenty of room, they just needed to raise the rolls a bit. No room to pull them that high. There's plenty of clearance. It turned into a no-win argument. I said, "Let's take it outside."

What I meant, of course, was that we should physically go out to the line to look at the thing. After all, the cell itself was right outside the dingblamed door. There was an odd little period of resistance, with the conversation weakly sputtering about what a useless idea it was, that they knew what they were talking about, and besides, it's too far away, and we might get dirty or something. Oy.

But eventually, a dozen or so guys (this is metals in the 80's, y'all) trooped out to the plating cell. By golly, the bearing area didn't look anything LIKE what either the engineers (or their drawings) OR the line operators thought it did.

And there's the key. I've found this in every industry and application I've ever worked on. Even if you have the best expert (or expertise), even if someone has the print, even if someone works with that machine or repairs it every day, the real world isn't what you remember it to be. I've seen it in optimizing production processes, in solving vendor quality problems, in creating paper forms, in industrial accident investigations, in product liability lawsuit defenses, in taming processes positively known to be "an art", in probabilistic modeling of schedules, even and especially in solving the toughest problems in complex aerospace systems.

Now, experts may have a great idea, and prints are invaluable, and maintenance guys have held the thing in their hands, and operators definitely know how to run the thing. But nine times out of ten, the problem has made it to the quality project level because there because of something that someone missed. There is no one who knows it all. In fact, the guy who knows it all and lets you know it often stands in the way of the solution. Doesn't matter what his/ her background is, school or experience or management or whatever.

The enclosure the team designed was far cheaper than the original. It was at least as effective. The cell itself was modified while it was down so that the bearings and rolls were much easier to change. Best of all, it kept the noxious vapors, noise and dust out of the operators' area while leaving line visibility pretty much intact. And the neighbors' cars got their last free car washes. Lots of wins.

You just can't beat holding the process in your hands real time. Fresh looks by a broad range of experts -- augmented by a physical process or presence, something like Being There -- has to be done. Throw in a young, unwashed brash guy fresh out of tech school -- or maybe if you're in metals and want to be sure your team is really kept on their toes (another story), a sharp, tough woman -- charged with demanding an explanation when they don't understand, and you've gone a long way toward your true problem statement and its solution.

AC