Blocking and Tackling

Vince Lombardi is quoted as saying: "Football is two things. It's blocking and tackling. I don't care about formations or new offenses or tricks on defense. You block and tackle better than the team you're playing, you win."

Daniel Cormier said of MMA, “You don’t get the highest levels of the sport without having the basics in order.”

 I don’t play football and have even less desire to be part of brutal endurance MMA matches. However, the concept is the same situated behind my dual-monitor work desk. Get down to the most basic piece of what your company, your QMS, is trying to accomplish.

If you manufacture, performing at the highest level is when you get the correct item made on time, on budget, to print. You win in service when you successfully diagnose and perform the task to completion, record, then bill accurately.

We recently considered the purchase of a laser scanning measurement arm. The technology was indescribably impressive. We have a custom and quite complicated machined part that we used as a demonstration piece. A salesperson came to our shop and set his machine on our rather cluttered steel table. Within 25 minutes he had an image on his computer with notable accuracy of the component we handed him.

Right at that exact moment was an inconspicuous choice: gain the capabilities of this radical measurement device or evaluate the fundamental needs of our design requirements. There should be significant anxiety when engineers want to obtain new toys to fix old problems.

I had an old metrology instructor who would say that he refused to teach someone to use coordinate gauges unless they could do the same measurements with dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are all the analog instruments common to machine shops. His reasoning was uncomplicated. In order to get the right measurement with hand gauges, one has to understand what the dimension is and what is being measured in that requirement. There is an impulse, especially around smart people, to jump ahead and skip the fundamentals. Understand the dimension, the tolerance, and “fit form function” that is encompassed in those.

Ultimately, we did not need the scanner. That sample part, however sophisticated, is well controlled and not a representative example of the risks our QMS needs to alleviate this year. That equipment, no matter how much I wanted it, neither blocked nor tackled. Get your basics in order; then be the champion.