Will it ever improve?
16 replies (most recent on top)
Quality Director K.Ken***y is a joke. What do y'all think? Wonder when the purging there would start.
Get rid of purchasing team and see how different our quality would be
As long as we keep squeezing the suppliers for Pennie’s, quality suffers
@js+1jmzs08mg
Mechanics are there to install and replace parts, they don’t know the first thing about designing them let alone bringing them to market. The company’s problem is the beancounters and the hourly personnel think they run the show and engineering takes a backseat to everything, see how far that mentality takes you. For all the talk you hear them spouting all the time about snowflakes they are some of the biggest snowflakes around!
How about listening to the mechanics and people that process warranty returned parts? They can identify a trend and report to the engineering people. No one wants to hear it or believe them because they are not college educated. Mechanics can tell more about a vehicle than any engineer.
Not just finance. CRID process. Bullying engineers into part changes for cost-saves. Those doing the CRID work then move on and the D&R is left to nurture the part which has been violated and soiled via outside forces.
The quality problem at Ford is not caused by engineering but by bean counters and marketing, I can’t tell you how many times in engineering we recommend a part and finance comes back to approve a cheaper version and says that it will do. Its always short term gain of buying a less expensive part then pay for it down the road with warranty because what we built into the vehicle isn’t durable or otherwise fit for purpose. A prime example the last few years has been circuit boards. Software will say we need X gigs of space, finance buys the board that is X-25% capacity and tell us to make our software take less space. We make it work by dropping features, then marketing says we need to add new stuff in and we end up breaking stuff as the boards are to small and under powered. Same cr-p happens with mechanical.
@ d1+1jmzs08mg
I do agree with your comment 100%, but I must say that if you are going to work at Ford, you MUST learn to spell warranty properly.
The Quality team has very weak leadership. The Engineering leadership is not leveraging Quality because the leadership is poor. The Quality Czar has been ineffective in leading the Engineering teams to embrace the processes that deliver Quality. A lot of brain drain has occurred…the post Covid Quality leaders LL4+ seem to have lost the knowledge of how to develop high Quality designs that delight our customers - they are more outside checkers at that is point, which is such a limited way to improve Quality. Quality LL4+ are no longer Champions of the proven methods to deliver high customer satisfaction in the forward models….The Engineering leaders just do the check the box work without deep diving root cause properly nor do they understand what is driving high customer satisfaction for each of the segments. The Engineering leaders understand the engineering, but don’t understand what it takes to execute with high Quality and deliver robust designs that matter to the customer. It is going to take a long time to build the technical knowledge of the Quality leadership that just does not have the expertise or leverage with the Engineering teams at this point.
Quality will improve only when it hits the execs and managers pocket books. Penalize Farley and all the leadership bands for every warrantee claim and every lawsuit. For example decrease Farleys bonus and stock options by a dollar for each warrantee issue for each vehicle. For example 500K trucks each have 20 warrantee issues, direct cost to Farley of 2 million dollars. No exec or manager should be receiving bonuses and stock options when they are doing such a poor job. Guaranteed there would overnight be laser focus on quality.
Get rid of all your experienced people, force them out and treat them like cr-p, then wonder why quality is taking a hit. Executives sure know what they are doing , don’t they. Talking about penny wise dollar foolish. They are a poster childeran for it.
Fartley and Billy’s grand plan to improve quality was to go full on BEV mode. ICE and Quality, STA, and Quality office were gutted. Most ICE issues have been from FOE which are no longer.
Where is Mulally when you need him?
No
@OP. Quality will improve when managers get fired for the recalls, when the quality processes are followed, when FMC restores all the Quality Control positions lost in the last 5 years... So when pigs fly... (when all the pigs in the C-suite and BOD fly from the kick in their backs)
Real improvements in quality won't be achieved until someone in management starts to respect processes enough to maintain them. We're so busy pivoting and putting out fires, that the processes used to maintain quality are neglected.
It will improve only when engineering LL5's and LL6's that have no business being in engineering, are removed from their positions. And everyone with a brain who works in PD knows there are plenty of them that are destroying the company from within.
Get rid of every LL6 and see the quality increase