Chapter 4: The teams and their logic

Being part of the CRISIS team though induced my gut feeling about the obligation – “finished what I had started”.

Let bygones be bygones

“Man made marvels” was one of my favourite programs in Discovery Channel; it showcased all marvellous architectures made by man and miracle of engineering and design on the earth. When Beijing Olympics 2008 opening ceremony was held in the legendary Bird’s Nest Stadium, people from around the world were overwhelmed by the spectacular events organized in this unique feature of the world’s largest steel structure stadium.

I was practically convinced that miracle does exist in human technology; looking at the sculptural design of Bird’s Nest, nothing is impossible. “Es gibt nichts, was unmöglich ist”, a German saying I learnt recently, carried the same meaning.

It was a quarter past nine in the morning, months after the recycled parts cleanliness issue made headlines, Mr Q, the new Quality director, handled me a new task – nailed down any possibilities associated with the recycled parts cleanliness issue. Of course, that would have to go along with Mr AA and his squad.

A new venture did not stir up the enthusiasm towards work as I had a beneficial plan ahead of me, and this was just the right time to take full advantage of my potential to play a more prominent role in an organization later. For a promising prospective in the business world outside this organization, I had decided to take a bold twist in my career.

Conversely, being part of the CRISIS team though induced my gut feeling about the obligation – “finished what I had started”. Till I saw the light of the rationale among those wicked parties, I must not abandon the job.

Like what I presumed earlier, the starting would be a tough set up as many vague and blurry indications connecting the subject prompted to be cleared. Round the corner, I had blunt tools, broken glasses, incomplete observations, and a pair of stinking shoes as well as a bunch of insensible people against the close-up of the high-tech machine.

My first question was how the CRISIS team defined problem statement for this issue. Most of the debates over this problem statement stemmed from how to ensure the machine producing cleaned parts. This made perceived illogical problem solving decision, such as optimizing robotic setting and repeatedly clean the parts’ container. A decisive factor such as dusty environment at the workplace was left off discussions.

The team suggested we must work on method and machine related problems so as to isolate the process (inputs), and concentrate on output target. The reason was cleaned parts were unloaded in the clean room class 100 environment sufficiently prevented any cross-contamination from occurring. Assembly parts were frequently exposed to surrounding adverse environment when transferred from one station to another station, a reflection of the oases in the middle of the desert.

Could these parts survive the undulating sand dunes under the scorching sun before they reached the next oasis? I was not convinced. If we were to set aside other factors by just focusing on method and machine, we had to rule out other factors.

Piece by piece I put all relevant information we had gathered earlier together and analyzed, the conclusion was shocking – the machine not only could not produce cleaned parts as claimed, the whole cleaning operation has created an unsafe environment. It was a disaster!

That led me to call another audit involving Facility, Industrial Engineering and Contamination control department. I suggested looking at that area in a wider perspective, at least the investigation must cover key factors such as Man, Method, Measurement, Machine and Environment.

The CRISIS team and individual’s approach

Mr PS, the engineer who in-charge of the cleaning process, showed a snubbing response to my analysis report; he argued that his task was to setup the cleaning process with the machine running at the location fixed by industrial engineering. For Mr PS, it was insensible if questioning he over work station issues such as environment control, recycled parts logistic control, factory safety measure and machinery design. His work was restricted to the extent where the other engineers must intervene to comprehend their own work on the high-tech machine project.

Mr SS, the SCRAP team leader and the recycling center process manager, foresaw the whole recycling process as perfect, expressed his concern of lack of diligence action from the CRISIS team. The recycling center, which was his area of responsibility, was satisfactorily in-controlled with the process flow and procedures on hand.

Nothing bizarre if Mr SS rather spent time attacking the weakness of presupposed action owner, than leading the whole team worked towards solving the problem when crisis strike. He was a typical straw man. His work favoring deceitful directive and “public” opinion, and what made the greatest number of top officers the happiest.

Mr MM, the Tooling and Maintenance engineer, stated that he was unaware of the whole drama on the move, as he simply worked on setting up the machine based design and instruction received from US. By a slight modification done on the original design, the installation matched the building structure and the room design. He sounded like as if no complaint regarding the machine setup received from either Mr PS or Mr SS.

Mr DD, the Contamination Control engineer, claimed that the setup passed Standard Air Particle Count Specification for the Compound room to achieve class 1000. That information did no help to quantify the magnitude of the problem caused by the high-tech machine.  

For Mr DD, the Sahara desert was unexpectedly calm and quiet; sand dunes, lines of desert date palm, thorny bushes and cactus around the oasis posed a thrilling nature. Until the next sand storm raging the Sahara desert, this stunning, dramatic desert landscape offered the most fascinating part of the desert world.

Contradicted to what Mr DD had reported, many visual evidences and symptoms had proved otherwise! Either Mr DD’s measuring system works the wrong way and he was too confident of the numeric data, or he lost his conscience to numb belief.

Ms NN, the EHS officer, was in-charge of overall factory environment health safety. Whether the Compound room was a safe and healthy workplace or not, she had the answer. However, the story about the workers exposing to hazardous environment and inhaling poisonous particles did not seem to bother her.

A special request for her department to perform re-assessment on the Compound room air quality was declined, except the requester department willing to reimburse all the expenses. Accepting this nasty arrangement suggested more times loss due to the Finance department’s long procedure getting budget approved in advance. That gave ample time to the wrongdoer to clean up the “crime” site before the next assessment.

Mr OO had been working in this company for years, approaching the retirement age. Among the coworkers, he was the one I liked to talk to understand the olden times. His stories about the world, the company and how he survived so many crises lured me to his prejudice and pragmatic world.

His long experiences as the EHS representative did not boost the confident about that safety issue could be solved single-handed and without getting the top management concession. For Mr OO to survive another crisis and make sure his position did not sway during the crash, he rather appealed to the authority than to be executed.

Mr ZZ, the Assembly Line superintendent and the workers’ supervisor, had chosen not to get involved in the drama. Resources constraint did exist since the implementation of high-tech machine, because more regular station cleaning and station’s workload increased dramatically due to increasing cleaning steps.

After months of using the high-tech machines, Mr ZZ must have noticed the collective effects as the result of the accumulative workloads in his work station, but he did not take appropriate action to solve them. Neither did he check on his work station safety issue nor did he report the deficiency and ask for a solution.

With no assertive voice came from this management, it appeared that I spoke on behalf of the unwary workers and single-handed the whole drama as if I am the one trying to make a mountain out of a molehill.

Yet, we got hold our endurance towards Mr ZZ’s sloppy attitude as we wanted his consent to have dialogue with the workers and evaluate the process without complication.

Ms LL, the purchaser, the person behind the company’s total cost management, had relentlessly pushed the whole company accepting her cost reduction plan had done more harm than benefit to the overall cost.

First came the sand storm, and then came the deadly drought. Just as, every mind circling the high-tech machine, the workers reported a new material used to clean parts had reduced quality and much less effective in cleaning the parts. Upon checking the record, we were cleared that the purchasing department brought in a cheaper stuff and bypassed standard engineering approval.

The decision to replace the original material with its cheaper version was based on Thailand’s engineering results which reported the cheaper version had comparable potential to do the same amount of jobs as the original version.

Ms FF, the Industrial engineering, declined to take full responsibility of this nonconforming layout. She claimed that her department had carried out a complete study of space utilization and its impact to productivity and quality before the project commenced.

Intermittently, neither the Functional team had complained the Compound room was not a proper location for high-tech machines, nor the management had condemned the progress. In her mind, if a powerful shot had put a full stop at the halfway of the project, it would not encounter any terrible consequences after start.

Mr AA, my coworker, one of the department right-hand men, had a close relationship with the head of department (HOD). That spared him privileges to avoid several levels of management to reach out the HOD for personal feat. He manipulated the facts of the problem and convinced those younger engineers to rush to get the action done without any solid evidence about the machine mechanical parts caused the problem.

The decision makers, the data analysts and the workers

Mr PP, the Facility director, was the only Facility guy came within reach of the CRISIS team. He insisted on answering every question about the issue in place of his Facility staff. Dialogue with people like Mr PP was truly testing. I had to be tactful if decreeing the subject matter pointing to what facility work would influence the issue significantly.

What the Facility staff did during the high-tech machine setup, and why he must agree to the setup knowing that it would probably an atrocious plan remained a clue to me? Eventually, he knew the possible failure, but, in point of fact, he was quite positive his department certainly not the first to answer.

Ms WW, my supervisor, claimed that Mr VV’s jobs had been relayed to other workers, and that seemed to her was a perfect arrangement even the vacant was not replaced. Her staff should accomplish multitasking handling additional tasks and comprehend each other works during staff scarcity period.

Mr Top man, was trying to avoid asserting his role in this sensitive issue during an open meeting with the CRISIS team, had insisted on having all-rounded opinion and conclusive data derived from every possible reason prior to his decision.

That was tremendously testing because that would take several round-trips for the CRISIS team to grant mutual concession comprising all key areas. It usually requested enormous attention from almost every department out of their usual and busy schedule to make this a reality.

(More than one year later, a local newspaper published the company had a mass recruitment of contamination control technical staff with an advanced degree. Perhaps, the root of the problem was incompetent technical staff. Until the recruitment met his target, the high-tech machine would have to run using available standard.)

The data analysts were the Quality engineer, Reliability engineer and the Analytical Service engineer. Their role limited to spotting a potential failure along with the data crunched from their presumed likely sources rather than be part of the team solving a company-wide problem.

The workers in the Compound room, majority were contract-workers hired from countries like Nepal, Pakistan or Myanmar. Communication was the greatest constraint during the study to get their feedback. Most of the feedbacks were relied on their supervisor’s reports and feedback from the local workers.

Wai Ping Lee/Apr 2011