Before we can have a conversation about processes and process controls for improving quality, we first must answer the essential question: What is quality? How do you define it? 

If you want to achieve quality,  you’ve got to have a very clear and crisp definition of quality, and particularly one that works for a manufacturing organization like a foundry. 

If you think about it, you might say quality is a lot like love––everybody is for it, and everybody knows it when they feel it. But when asked to define it, people stumble around; and when they need help with it, they seek professionals. Unfortunately, it’s the same with quality.

Now, quality from a consumer point of view is going to be defined by features and benefits. Let’s say you’re buying a dishwasher––you want it to be quiet, you want it to have certain cycles for the fancy silver, you want it to match other appliances. But we know from the manufacturing perspective, to get those features and benefits we’ve got to build certain things into that product. And we’ve got to express those as requirements for the production of those products. 

So, my definition of quality is this, and it’s a two-part definition: (1) Quality is conformance to requirements. That’s borrowed from Phil Crosby, who wrote “Quality is Free,” and other books on quality in the ‘80s. I make the following addition to Crosby’s definition: (2) “Quality is conformance to requirements at a cost that the customer perceives as value. 

We all know we can achieve conformance to requirements either expensively or inexpensively. The goal, of course, is to reduce waste and cost in the process. Four classic costs associated with quality are buried inside the cost of manufacturing. They are:

1) External failure––all the costs associated with flawed products that leave your factory, such as the cost of returns and warranties. 
2) Internal failure––all the costs of things that you should have done once, but you ended up having to do multiple times because it wasn’t done right the first time. This would be all the scrap and rework and other types of waste inside the factory. 
3) Appraisals––the costs of inspections and tests. Nobody pays you for these––you do them because you don’t have confidence that the process you created is good enough the first time around, and that costs you. 
4) Prevention––that’s the cost of trainings to achieving competence.  Other examples of prevention costs are quality planning and supplier auditing, things that quality engineers are supposed to be doing with their time instead of chasing down defects. Things that make it less likely for problems to occur. When we spend our time and effort and resources on those things, that’s prevention costs. 

Within the context of the costs incurred surrounding quality, combined with the costs foundries incurred in the processes of metalcasting, the subject of profit is not well understood by most people outside our industry. They may well imagine that when we sell castings, we take all these costs, whatever they may be, and we add onto them a decent profit, which becomes the selling price. Today, that just doesn’t work––customers are savvy enough to know what a piece of metal costs. And they don’t just ask you about your price; they competitively quote it. So, whereas that concept might work with luxury yachts or Rolex watches––where the more expensive it is the more people want it––it doesn’t work with castings. The way the world works now is, you have a target price. You subtract from that the cost of manufacturing, which includes all the quality expenses. And if there’s anything left over, you can call it profit. It’s the same formula but it starts at a different place. 

The more you understand process control and the two key foundry roles responsible for maintaining conformance to requirements at a price the customer perceives as value, the more likely the foundry’s profitability will increase.

The Goal of Process Control—

A Vision for Something Better

The goal of process control is stability. We want boring days as production people and as quality people. There’s an old Russian curse that says, “May you live in interesting times.” We don’t want to work in interesting times––we want everything that we do to come out in a predictable manner. And so the goal of process control is to establish systems that make things come out the same. 

How do we do that? We need to control the important things that drive variability in our process. Those variables are the “five M’s plus one”––man, material, method, measurement, and machine, plus environment. In the PCE book, we talk about how to communicate and document controls for these variables and how to assess whether the controls we’ve established are going to be good enough based on a risk analysis. 

And how are we doing as an industry in controlling the variables that impact quality? I’ll answer that by contrasting for you what the quality process of a foundry often looks like versus the PCE method described in my book. 

The foundry is frequently organized like this: There will be someone with “engineer” in their title whose job it is to figure out the design of risers and gates, what processes should be used to make them, and what controls ought to be in place. Then the production team is handed this set of directions and told to make as many as possible as quickly as possible to meet the requirements of the customer. And there’s a maintenance group whose job is to keep stuff running so production can keep making castings as fast as possible. And if there is a QC function, their job is to check parts in a finishing room to make sure they meet the minimum requirements acceptable to the customer. 

So, quality is an after-the-fact check. And in fact, quality control has become another way essentially making sure we don’t ship stuff that’s bad. 

But in the book, what I recommend is that we do it a little more like this: We get quality involved at the beginning of the process. And we determine how to make products as a combination of both production folks and  quality folks, so that design and process are in harmony. We try to build in things like error-proofing, and we try to understand our process capability so we don’t ask people to do something that is impossible for them to do on a regular basis. 

The production process is also slightly altered in this new approach, because now I want to make as many good parts as possible. And I’m going to build into that production process a series of feedback loops based on the principle of quality improvement known as PDCA: plan, do, check, and act. In this scenario, the quality engineers are also involved in monitoring the process and supporting it to be both efficient and open for improvement.   
Even the job of maintenance changes from one of simply making machines able to run to making the equipment operate efficiently and with the highest degree of availability. 

The result of these philosophical process changes is that the process now delivers good parts––it is planned to deliver good parts, and what I should get from the customer is satisfaction. But if I failed in that task, I’ll get feedback. What I don’t want is to rely on the wall quality control checks. It’s very wasteful and expensive to wait till the end of the process to find out that something had gone awry. That former feedback loop was so long that you can’t go back and tell the guys to fix something because they’ve already moved on to something else by that time.

Process Engineers and Quality Engineers

So, let’s now talk about the roles of the process engineer and the quality engineer, and how they can effectively work together to support production and achieve quality castings. Please don’t overlook that word: support.

Quality’s job is to support production. In fact, behind my desk there’s a banner that says, “Our mission is to support production” That is my concept of how the foundry workplace works. This involves the close cooperation of two kinds of folks for whom my book is written:  (1) process engineers who are normally embedded in the manufacturing process, and (2) quality engineers who are considered a support department––and they overlap a lot. 

These two people usually have different goals and purposes. Often, the quality engineers are considered the police, while the process engineers are considered the friends of production, who are trying to support short setups, get more stuff out the door, and keeping the equipment running when maintenance is not around. That’s a very dysfunctional approach to making things work in a company. 

In the diagram titled, “The role of a Process/Quality Engineer” you’ll notice there’s a big section of overlap between these two engineers. That area of overlap can be summarized as the preventive actions we’re doing to make things better or to remove obstacles in the path of successful production. 

These engineers don’t physically make anything the foundry can sell––their job is to make sure there are fewer obstacles in the way of selling parts––and making customers so excited about getting those parts that they buy more!
So, process engineers have a real and important role as a resource to the production line. Their specialized tasks include helping with setups, managing and monitoring tooling, supporting the planning of equipment maintenance and PMs, and keeping the plant in a “5S” type condition 24:7

On the other hand, the process quality engineer is a resource of expert knowledge about improvement. These two people should work together in the overlap, bringing their expertise and ultimately serving production by improving the process. 

Harness Their Talent

Engineering resources are precious––and if the majority of AFS foundries are comprised of 75 people or less, those engineers are scarce, so you want to use them appropriately. Think carefully about the job you’re asking them to do. And if you’re fortunate to have two, make one a process engineer and one a quality engineer, and train them on the distinctions. 

Bottom line, engineers serve the community of production––don’t just tell them what to do; serve them. Yes, we need rules. An environment without rules does not result in a good outcome for anybody. You’ve got to have a standard for work that needs to be followed. But our job is to support production, and we need to respect their role. 

When we do that and serve them appropriately, they will also come to respect us and lean on us for advice. When the engineer shows up and asks a question, they don’t scurry away to avoid telling you what they did wrong. You want open, transparent communication between process, quality, and production. You can’t trim your beard or put on makeup without looking in the mirror, and you can’t fix something until you know the truth about it. That’s my where my heart is about process control for engineers.