Race cars to nuclear grade dish soap: A spectrum of quality strategy

It’s been a long and incredibly nonlinear journey to get where I am today.  I’ll start by saying that I never intended to get into quality engineering.  I sought an engineering degree so I could help design the next Camaro and make it super sweet and fast.  But the one thing that I found greater value in than going fast is opportunity, and there has always been plenty of opportunity in quality engineering. 

Because Racecar

A really big part of this journey was Formula SAE (FSAE).  For those who aren’t familiar with it, this is, in my opinion the premier collegiate engineering design challenge in the world.  We were offended at the mere suggestion that this was a club; it was really more of a lifestyle, and at times could be consuming to the point of being unhealthy.  We had a skillfully crafted set of rules that mostly centered on keeping us from doing something dumb enough to kill ourselves at an event, and enough latitude to really let budding engineers choose to take on much more than could be accomplished in a year. 

It was the ultimate school of hard knocks.  We were the designers, manufacturers, end users and maintenance techs.  Many mechanics can relate to cursing engineers in their head when working on cars.  In our case, we were the engineers that designed these things, which made this a truly character-building experience.  What’s more, we were also in charge of things like maintaining a shop and seeking sponsorship. The college provided us with space and a little money, but 95% of our budget we had to chase from outside sponsorship.  To keep us well-rounded, the event also included a cost/accounting event and a marketing event.  This forced us to either learn accounting and marketing, or better yet, reach out to the business college and find people who weren’t engineers who could actually do this well.

Building a race car is the antithesis to any reasonable quality processes that have been in standard practice since WWII.  Our process control was “do the best you can while substituting caffeine for sleep,” and our quality policy was “it has to be perfect but we're amateurs, so if you need two parts, buy enough material for five.” 

Tribal knowledge hard knocks

The other really humbling moment was training new members.  It was truly a sink-or-swim organization, and most people only stuck around a few weeks.  Most of the team leadership was on their second or third year on the team.  I think I might have set a record with 11 years active on the team between my BSME, PhD ME, a co-op, Artillery Officer training and a deployment.  Although I will also note that I had to very intentionally dial my involvement back to more of an advisory role in the second half of grad school. 

The hard part about training new members was really nailing down part quality.  As mentioned above we were, in many senses, the blind leading the blind, but the real difference was that we at least knew that we had to make five parts to get two that met requirements.  We quickly learned that if you gave a newbie some material and a drawing, gave him a 15 minute instruction on how to use a lathe or mill and asked him to make 2 parts, that you had a 97% chance that what you would end up with was two utterly unusable parts.

In fact, one of my predecessors printed the "Eleven Value Scale," which included a list of value descriptions that ranged from a score of 10: Ideal, to 0: Absolutely Useless. Oddly this was a somewhat standard reference at that time, and I even recall it being mentioned in the PMBOK as I prepared for my PMP certification in 2015, but can no longer find any reference to it on the internet. Fortunately I do have a picture from my archives:

Our knowledge was almost all tribal. Often parts had to be within about .003 inches to fit, and we knew that this meant they had to read within .001 on our Harbor Freight calipers.  Little did we know we were actually applying guard banding; we just knew it worked.  We eventually learned that we would have to pass this lore down to our new members. 

Personally, I saw the Eleven Value Scale as too reactive; all it accomplished was to discourage new members by making their first opportunity for feedback the point where they already wasted a bunch of time and material. Its only function was to quantify hazing.

At the same time, the struggles we had with new members generally fell into two categories: some kids would attempt to measure a press fit with a ruler, while others would spend 25 minutes trying to find a micrometer to measure the length of a push bar handle that could have easily been ± 6 inches.

We didn't know anything about GD&T, but we at least had a subjective grasp at precision. I found the simplest way to pass down what I knew about parts with critical tolerances (that we never had time to formally calculate) was to at least give some guidance on what you should measure features with. Behold, the 11 Distance Tolerance Scale.

Little did I know it, but this would be my first foray into quality engineering. As the lead TA for our Manufacturing Engineering for Mechanical Engineers course, I really didn't enjoy teaching the lab on statistical process control and quality, however I did discover that I was actually able to do a pretty darn good job of explaining it, which brought a new form of reward. Even though I wasn't excited about statistics, I did understand it, I was passionate about making parts that were actually good, and I was just salty and gruff enough that people took me seriously.

I didn't choose the quality engineering life, the quality engineering life chose me.

Nuclear grade dish soap

More than a decade later I found that my relentless pursuit of opportunity had led me somewhere very different from designing the suspension for the new Camaro.  FSAE taught me that the auto racing and performance market is carried by a bunch of guys who are content working 80+ hours for 3σ less than average industry pay just so they can "build cool stuff." Most of us used FSAE as a life lesson that there are greater things in life than work, so we sought things like stable jobs with good pay, good culture and work/life balance. 

As such, I found myself in this weird polar opposite to FSAE, where I was doing supplier quality engineering for nuclear weapons parts.  One thing I quickly learned is that anything that touches a nuclear weapon component, even if it's just for processing, has to go through the product acceptance process.  This included dish soap, so one of the fun things I liked to point out to new employees was that the dish soap in our break room, which came in a bottle you would recognize in a grocery store, had a product acceptance tag that indicated it was indeed weapons grade.

Those of us who had worked at other companies knew that we were working in a fantasy world.  The one thing that nuclear weapons production had in common with race car engineering was that neither of these were viable financial ventures without a whole lot of external support.  In Formula SAE, we were able to find generous sponsors to put their logos all over our car, and also had the philanthropic angle of supporting some very bright and ambitious engineering students.  At KCNSC, we had the leverage of the largest defense budget on earth to buy absolute assurance that our product met the highest quality standards in the known universe.

It was not unlimited though. While budget increases were possible to obtain when justified, it took enough approvals to provide sufficient stewardship over tax dollars. Those who were experienced with some of the more complex issues we faced in the pursuit of perfection learned that it was indeed possible to go too far, and eventually there came a point of diminishing returns and reason had to step in. 

Right sizing quality

Having worked in both of these extremes, I have a genuine appreciation for helping choose where you ought to stand on the quality spectrum.  Your desired location on this spectrum depends on a lot of things; most importantly customer expectations, but is also affected by things like product mix, volume, process stability, and many other factors.

Big W Engineering Solutions’ goal in QMS development is to find the most efficient method to fulfill customer expectations while maximizing operating efficiency.  As small business owners ourselves, we also strive to minimize operational overhead while giving the best we can give to our customers and fulfilling every promise we humanly can.  For some firms this can mean a very robust AS9100+ nuclear grade dish soap system; for others this can be more of a stripped down Formula Car version built to the constraints of “before you can finish first, first you must finish.” 

Successfully right sizing your quality system requires true partnership, a combination of our varied outside perspective and your in-depth knowledge of what truly matters in your specialty.  Our ideal is building a system that doesn’t just give you a certification, but rather integrates internationally-accepted frameworks into your processes so well that getting certified comes naturally. If this is what you're looking for, either shoot us a contact request or set up some time to talk today!