By Tom Pyzdek
One day, early in my quality career, I was approached by my friend Wayne, the manager of our galvanizing plant.
"Tom," he began, "I've really been pushing quality in my area lately, and everyone's involved. We're currently working on a problem with plating thickness. Your reports always show a 3-percent to 7-percent reject rate, and we want to drive that number down to zero."
I, of course, was pleased. The galvanizing area had been the company's perennial problem child. "How can I help?" I asked.
"We've been trying to discover the cause of the low thicknesses, but we're stumped. I want to show copies of the quality reports to the team so they can see what was happening with the process when the low thicknesses were produced."
"No problem," I said, "I'll have them for you this afternoon."