Hand It Back

Some companies have a great way of preventing quality errors from being passed on person to person as a job travels downstream. What they do is charge each operation with checking the quality of work incoming from preceding operations. Any defective work they catch can be returned to the previous operation for correction. But once they pass the work on to the next operation, they now are responsible for any defects or errors they didn't catch. If the next operation finds an error and sends it back to them correction, they are not allowed to pass it back upstream even though the defect was caused by a preceding operation.

For example: Operation A makes a mistake, doesn't catch it when it happened, and sends the work to Operation B. Operation B looks over the incoming work, doesn't catch the error, proceeds correctly with its operation and sends the work to Operation C. Operation C looks over the incoming work and catches the error made by operation A and passed on by Operation B. Operation C sends the work back to B, and now B (to its chagrin) must correct the error. Operation B is not allowed to send the error back to the originator, operation A.

The purpose? To ensure that people thoroughly check incoming work. In this case, you can bet that Operation B will be checking what it gets from Operation A very closely in the future. You can also bet that this model ensures that all downstream operations are very careful about what they accept from any upstream operation.

In case you were wondering, if Operation B doesn't have the know-how or equipment to fix Operation A's error in the example above, Operation A will fix the error. But the cost of the repair will then be charged to Operation B!

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