Adonis Diaries

Posts Tagged ‘quality standards

Article #28, December7, 2005

“How do you perceive the inspection job to mean?”

Inspection in engineering has a narrow meaning that connotes quality control of physical products.

It might be viewed as a statistical process in production to keep physical errors in the manufactured products within acceptable ranges with subsequent determination of an inspector or production manager of whether the production mechanism satisfies certain quality control specifications.

It might be understood as a method for inspecting individual items whether the task is paced as in conveyor belts or the pacing is under control of the inspector and his own rate of work.

The concept of inspection might also be studied from a Human Factors organizational perspective of the personal qualities of inspectors and the work pressures from individual workers or groups trying to influence his decision for refusing batches of products.

In this perspective, inspection is implicitly of people; inspection decisions about a man’s work directly reflected upon him and thus the resentment associated with the age, skills, gender and professional behavior of the inspector.

Inspectors are expected not to be impaired in their eyesight, auditory and tactual judgments and be highly trained and knowledgeable about quality standards.

An inspector must have opinions about the working conditions, how workers are paid when defects are found, method of payment of the inspector and number of break time, general environment in quality of lighting, noise and temperature, organizational factors of isolation, interruptions, monotony and decision pressures from foremen and supervisors, calibration at interval of inspectors’ norms or their expectations in rate of defects, pre-conceived ideas of accuracy resulting from deterioration in physical or mental abilities and lack of agreement on quality.

Is inspection the task of a single person for a phase in the production process or should it be an organization within the administration having responsibility for the total control of quality starting from the design concept for the foreseeable errors, risks and safety, usage of the product not intended for, raw materials, subcontracted parts, manufacturing, packaging, recall, marketing deficiencies and customers’ complaints because quality is finally in the customer eyes and mind?

Should an inspector be part of the team in the production process or independent associated with a specific inspection organization?

Some companies do not take inspection seriously and most of the times assign this task to employees about to retire who in turn perceive their new assignment as a downgrading in their responsibilities.

Some companies are ready to sacrifice quality in order to maintain a steady flow in the conveyer belt; for example it is well known that cars produced on Mondays and Fridays are fraught with systematic defects because on these days novices replace the high rate of absentee trained employees.  The fact is since weekly checks are paid on Thursdays it encourage trained workers to extend their vacation from Friday to Tuesday.  Failing to show up on Friday and Monday the work force is altered which condition the administration learn to cope with as best it can.   In this case, companies allocate expense funds to repairing returned products through warranties.

Blood all over the floor (December 8, 2008)

It is 1952 and General Douglas Mac Arthur was saying “Our relative decline, our incapacity to conserve our resources, the vertiginous growth of our national debt, and the weight of our financial engagements are putting our next generations at risk”.

It is 1972 and the inflation was rampant; the Midwest farmers were in high debt and Latin America was in acute debt. President Carter order the FED chairman Paul Volcker to contain inflation.

Volcker invited the Wall Street Journal executives for lunch and asked them “When blood is all over the floor, would you guys support my policy?” 

The executives did not hesitate and they were affirmative.

The US returned to a strong dollar policy.

The Midwest farmers sold their farms at peanut prices and Latin America experienced blood shed for half a century, such as genocides, dictatorship, military coups, facilitating the investment of the US multinationals, destroying the equatorial forests, and barbarically excavating raw material mines in Chili and Peru and so on.

The US has been indebted for over half a century at the expense of over two billion people living under the survival level. I have a simple question:

And the question remains|:”why the US should not experience blood on the floor?”

In the nineties, many books were published warning that the premises and practices of “mondialization, or globalization” are volatile and highly flammable.

For example, Danny Roderick (1997), in his “Has globalization gone too far in its way?”, stated that

1. First, eliminating regulations on commerce and investment was premature;

2.  Second, that there was lack of fairness in the practices among the developed and under-developed States.

3. Third, that the US and European quality standards were being forced on States that cannot produce according to the satisfaction of the western nations; that was an excellent excuse for outsourcing and relocating factories in countries with cheaper manpower; the consequence was that all these products could not be exported but into States with the same quality standards.

What would happen if these markets stopped importing?

All the products that are not fit for inner commerce would have to be sold as scrap.

4. Fourth, the coverage of social guarantees was exhausted in the under-developed States and the population left to mend for themselves. The Establishments in the US mocked these warnings since “History has reached an end” and the US economic model was in for ever.

The unemployed in the US have no where to go to die within their family members.

In China, millions of the little people are being forced back into their remote villages. To do what?

Most probably the Chinese out of work in sweat shop factories would die away from urban eyes and far from the media.

The US people have been in debt for a decade to cover all kind of charges because their earnings in the last two decades were lowered constantly while 1% owns one fifth of the US wealth.

I have a simple question “why those blood sucker billionaire capitalists should not have their blood spattering on the floor?”


adonis49

adonis49

adonis49

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