Total Quality Control
For NASCO, the often-complex endeavor to manage quality in the automotive industry consistently comes down to three simple, but profound, principles: Hire and retain the brightest, high-integrity people. Invest in and maintain the most advanced equipment. And, above all, hold the greatest reverence for supplier and customer relationships.
Quality Marks the Calendar
NASCO’s emphasis on leveraging the latest technologies to optimize quality involves daily preventive-maintenance meetings that culminate in a monthly daylong maintenance shutdown.
In meetings, engineers and technicians examine last month’s productivity results, set new goals and optimize preparedness for orders on the horizon.
During shutdown, specialists perform routine maintenance on all machinery and equipment, and bring employees together to discuss methods for improvement.
Improvement Never Ends
Because communication is the only way to ensure the best ideas drive the manufacturing and QC process, NASCO holds fast to a consistent, clockwork schedule of team process meetings.
- Cross-functional Obeya (or “war room”) meetings facilitate an optimum level of productivity, quality and efficiency by preventing “departmental think”—a manufacturing trait notorious for promoting assumptions that cause mistakes and redundancies that cost money.
- Weekly Kaizan meetings bring representatives from each department together—on the production floor—to exchange information, share insights and solve problems.
