Let me set the scene
for you. It's a beautiful Summer day here in Livonia, Michigan, home of the
Realtrac development team. Nearing lunchtime, a group of developers get
together and decide to go to Qdoba to grab some burritos and talk about our
super awesome product. As the developers sit down and eat, one of shares some
truly unfortunate bit of news: Their luscious, delicious burrito is filled with
pork, not the chicken they ordered.
If you've had a Qdoba burrito, you know how this mistake can
set your world spinning out of control (pork is delicious and all, but when
you’re expecting chicken, it’s a rude surprise). Does the developer get up and
rectify this situation directly? Nah. You see, we've been working so hard on
understanding quality processes, this simple pork for chicken mistake sparks a
new challenge for the development team: Design a quality process that would
make sure no customer ever again gets a pork burrito when they order chicken.
There's a tongue in cheek delivery to the above story, but
it is a legitimate one. Once upon a time, the Realtrac development team had no
knowledge of manufacturing and production processes. Thankfully we're lucky
enough to literally have our development offices attached to a plant floor. So
any time we want to learn about something, it's simply a matter of walking out
our door and walking over to an expert in whatever field we're studying and
trying to implement in our ERP software.
In addition to this
amazing resource right outside our door, we’re lucky enough to communicate
regularly with our customers. Most of the very successful organizations we’ve
talked with believe that quality is something everyone in the organization
contributes to. From engineering to purchasing to shop floor production to
shipping, every step in the process is completed with an eye on producing a
high quality product. They understand that while quality is a process, it is
also an ideology. In our interactions with successful organizations, everyone -
from the person working a machine on the floor, to the program manager working
with customers, to the engineers designing the parts, realizes that quality is
something that goes in to every step of the processes they are responsible for.
As I write this, we have shipped our 10.7 Client release,
the biggest update in the history of Realtrac, a mere few hours previous. But
grass does not grow under our feet. Our next major release will feature
improved Quality features. While we’re still working on the details, we have
identified our 2 main objectives:
- · Provide a system that guides users to make decisions with quality in mind (a fancy way of saying that we try to build systems that enforce processes that will ensure a high quality product is produced).
- · Allow the user to capture quality data, report on it and help them make conclusions based on that data.
For the past year, we've been talking with our customers,
multiple ISO/AS/TS trainers and auditors and even reading good old fashioned books
on quality to prepare for our development. In this time period we've tested ideas,
scrapping some and improving the others. The cornerstone that Realtrac is built
on is ease of use; any features we introduce must be easy to understand and
use. The good news is that it's not too late. We're still planning, designing
and improving our systems. Please don't hesitate to let your Realtrac account
representatives know what systems you need in place in your organization. What
systems can we build to help guarantee the quality of your parts? What quality
data do you need to easily, reliably need to capture to ensure the quality of
your parts?
Alas, we still haven’t solved the problem of how to make
sure no one ever gets a mistaken pork burrito, but maybe with enough input from our
customers, we can come up with the solution together!
