I don’t like it when I see some people highlight Fix Or Repair Daily acronym. Leadership always promises to work on quality improvement but I'm not sure how much they keep their promises.... What needs to be done to really improve quality? Radical changes?
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Heavily tie executive compensation to quality metrics and it will change overnight.
"I can tell you, if the 2020 explorer would have had just 9 months more engineering time, it would've been a great launch and an awesome product."
Quote: @1zla+1cPgkAfr
Spot us another 18 months, and it still would have been a botched launch and a mediocre product. None of the defects I know about would have been caught by any of our traditional analytical, or physical verification methods.
If anything, 18 months would have given us more time to come up with and implement even more half baked TVM items that would have further added to the mess.
Eliminate the greedy PD LL's that compromise our products at the benefit of their PR metrics.
We have way too many that contribute nothing. Too many that are negatives in terms of productiveness. Identify and eliminate the deadwood from the company. Stop all the churn. Put capable and technically qualified into the correct positions. Start by eliminating all the conway promotions. Then those on the friends and family plan.
never going to happen.
As any long time employee will tell you it is painfully obvious what the fundamental and total issues are. And there are too many to list.
With this note, I am going to make many of you unhappy. Think about it.
Benchmark results indicate Ford timing is uncompetitive, too long. Recall records show Ford is a leader of the industry, number too high. So time is not an issue. The true issue is what is being done within the given amount of time.
Management likes shorter time, as everyone else should also. However, due to the lack of expertise and proper reporting organization, no one is responsible, no one wants to be responsible, and no one can be responsible for how to do things correctly. With that, most everything many years ago continue to be done in a shorter time without knowing that physical-analytical-simulator type of change is just a toolset change and efficiency action. It is not going to change the end outcome. These toolsets only allow the same things done differently and with higher complexity. Squeezing the same tasks into shorter and shorter time caused you to run out of time and also gave you an excuse for why you are doing bad jobs. The fundamental, which is perceived by many as one and only one way of producing a vehicle, has not changed and many people are VERY happy about it. Senior management want answers to those questions associated with their work 20 years ago (always the right way) when they were GSR. Can you not answer? Now, top to bottom, doing the same old things makes everyone happy until the product is out of door and problems coming back. Failure to resolve the conflicts arise from a slow and complicated vehicle process is the ki---r.
Even given all the evidences showing that industry changes are coming, people resisted the needs for changes because they don't want to change. Even if you complete everything on the book, problems will come back because they have been coming back for many, many years back to when you had lots of time.
Management needs to leave behind the We are Better than everyone else/ know more than anyone else attitude.
Open minds and ears will hear employee and supplier input.
As a quality expert I agree with too much pressure is being put on taking time out of engineering process. An MIT educated manager has this as her task. She is confusing the engineering design process with manufacturing production processes. They are very different. When designing something new it is important to promote thinking.
"We don't have time to rush" should be considered as a new important step to turn quality around.
The 'Never time to do it right, but always time to do over' mentality is too far embedded into the Ford culture. It's now too little, too late.
Too little, too late. Ford has cast their reputation as the “recall king” and competitors have and will capture market share, including trucks. Fixing the Ford issues will take time but you will still struggle with the culture for years and years to come. By then, market will have shifted and Ford will be sold. All self inflicted, so sad.
I'll tell you, it's very simple actually. Add more time for engineering to develop and prove out these vehicle programs instead of rush rush rush to meet the insane timing plans. Management has no clue how long it takes to do the job right, and, do all the tracking baloney work at the same time.
I can tell you, if the 2020 explorer would have had just 9 months more engineering time, it would've been a great launch and an awesome product.
But thanks to the panic fire fighting of problems and rushing to meet timing, we ended up with a sour lemon.
Stop with the stupid TVM actions for one thing. Nearly everyone backfires in some way.