The hidden factory

Leo Spector
Plant Engineering. 43.10 (June 8, 1989): p9.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. (US)
http://www.planteng.com
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One of the most heartwarming American success stories in manufacturing improvement is

being written by Tennant Co., a Minneapolis-based manufacturer. Tennant embarked on a
"quest for quality" about 10 years ago with continuing impressive results. Douglas Hoelscher,
a Tennant vice president and one of the prime movers in the effort, talked about the program
in his keynote address at the recent Plant Engineering and Maintenance Show.

Back in the late 1970s, Tennant's management became concerned when they began receiving
some complaints about the quality of their products. So they asked Phil Crosby, a
management consultant, to help them install a quality improvement program. Crosby quickly
uncovered a major problem.

As Hoelscher explained it, the manufacturing process had reached a point where assembly
workers were literally manufacturing machines for rework. By 1978, the company was
employing 18 rework people in the assembly area. They were reworking quality into products
at a considerable cost.

Crosby insisted that the rework operation had to go because it was "unquality" - the
expenditure of time, energy, and resources to correct things not done right the first time. It
took a while to do it but the company finally got the ball rolling. Today the assembly rework
operation consists of one person, and product quality has increased dramatically.

Recently I had an opportunity to chat with Dr. Armand Feigenbaum about manufacturing
quality concerns. Feigenbaum is one of the pioneering figures in the quality control
movement in the U.S. and the author of the definitive text, Total Quality Control, now in its
third edition. In the course of our conversation, Feigenbaum used the term hidden factory,
and I asked him what he meant. He told me it was that proportion of plant capacity that exists
to rework unsatisfactory parts, to replace products recalled from the field, or to retest and
reinspect rejected units. It can amount to anywhere from 15 to 40% of productive capacity.
There is no better way to improve productivity than to convert the hidden factory to
productive use, and modern plant-wide quality programs provide one of the most practical
ways to do it.

How about your plant? Does it have a hidden factory? Most plants do. But they wouldn't if
everyone in the place learned to do it right the first time!

Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)

Spector, Leo. "The hidden factory." Plant Engineering, 8 June 1989, p. 9. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A7682253/ITOF?u=vuw&sid=ITOF&xid=b828609d.
Accessed 17 Apr. 2019.