Problem solving
- Owner
- Our problem-solving lead, with the plant's team leads
- Scope
- Root causes for the open cases, team by team, worst first.
- Closed when
- A root cause counts when it is verified, not when it is written down.
Case study · Automotive Tier 1 · Escalation Support
Escalation Programme: Working Inside the Plant's Teams
How we worked inside a Tier-1 plant in its customer's escalation programme: what we looked at, the work packages, the daily rhythm and the closing rules.
Anonymised project. The client, its customer and the product are not named, and the case carries no figures.
- Client
- A Tier-1 supplier
- Its customer
- A premium automotive OEM
- Product
- Electrical and electronic components the assembly line cannot run without
- Region
- Europe
- Our part
- Problem solving, data and reporting, inside a supplier-development team
Situation
The customer had put the plant into its escalation programme. The plant makes electrical and electronic components for vehicle assembly. When one is missing, the customer's line stops.
Open problem cases had piled up in every production team. Corrective actions were waiting for a technical assessment, and nobody could show the customer which of them had worked.
How it started
The customer's commodity quality team commissioned the work through a supplier-development partner. The plant hosted it.
The mandate was plain. Work down the open cases, assess the corrective actions and prove which ones work. The plant's quality manager stayed the owner and approver of every case and every gate.
What we looked at
A plant under escalation has no time for visitors who only write reports. So we spent the first days on the floor, watching and asking, before drawing any conclusion. Then came the data.
- A rolling Pareto by defect position, split by where the defect was found: in line, at central rework or at the gate.
- A concentration map of the defects on the product layout.
- Every count by production date, not by claim date, which can come weeks later.
- The control plan and the PFMEA, read against what the floor actually did.
- A project charter, a RACI, a stakeholder map and a risk register.
- Later, a maturity check of the quality gate itself.
Work packages
Every gap became a package with an owner. The turning point came when the customer set the order: the gate had to work first, and everything else came after it.
Systemic improvement and gate monitoring
- Owner
- Our problem-solving lead, with the plant's quality manager
- Scope
- The control plan, the PFMEA and the gate method, where the gaps were, with the gate's findings tracked from every source.
- Closed when
- The documents match what the floor does.
Implementing the actions and proving they work
- Owner
- Our shop-floor expert, with the plant engineers
- Scope
- Each corrective action put in place and checked on production.
- Closed when
- Production data shows the effect.
The worst positions, every week
- Owner
- The plant for containment, the customer's task-force lead for problem solving
- Scope
- Added later: a rolling list of the defect positions that hurt most.
- Closed when
- A position leaves the list after the agreed clean run.
Who did what
- Customer
- Commodity quality, the supplier quality engineer, the task-force lead and resident engineers at its own checkpoint.
- Supplier-development partner
- The project manager, remote and on site.
- Qualiteh
- Problem solving, data, assessments, dashboards and reports, and a shop-floor expert who put the actions in place and checked them.
- The plant
- The quality manager as owner and approver of every case, and the team leads.
Ground rules
- Only plant staff take measurements.
- A disputed finding is confirmed by a plant quality engineer.
- The project never stops production.
How the work ran
- Every morning and evening
- A short pitch to plan the day and a wrap-up to close it.
- Every day
- Booked hours on the floor for each team. A gate meeting where attendance was mandatory, or an informed deputy came.
- Every week
- A review of finished work with its evidence, a KPI review, and a review of the top issues with a one-page sheet per claim.
- Every week, to the customer
- A report agreed with the plant before it was sent. One red package made the whole status red.
- Mid-programme
- A steering committee with the customer.
Closure rules
- A containment point closed only after the agreed run of clean working days at every gate.
- Containment stayed in place until the 8D had shown, at its validation step, that the corrective action works.
- A point that failed again went back to the top of the list.
- A problem case closed only with its root cause verified, its action in place and the action shown to work.
What got in the way
- Leadership time was shared with other priorities.
- Coaching was read as an audit.
- Floor time was tighter than planned.
- Data had to be taken out of the systems by hand.
What we did
- We watched and asked before we judged.
- We presented in the room first and sent the documents afterwards.
- We wrote the ground rules down with the plant.
- We kept one open data set instead of side reports.
- We escalated only when data was withheld.
Exit criteria
- The de-escalation criteria in the customer's letter, tracked by family. Their values stay confidential.
- Every containment point closed on its clean run.
- Open actions handed over with named owners.
The customer decides when its programme steps down. The plant's quality manager approves every case and every gate.
What stayed with the client
- The registers of open cases, actions and containment points.
- The dashboard, and the daily and weekly reports in the customer's format.
- The written ground rules.
- A one-page sheet per claim.
- The closure rules, agreed with the customer.
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