Re: "see? I told you it wasn't my fault"

On 3/20/2024 2:45 PM, Jeff Liebermann wrote:

On Wed, 20 Mar 2024 06:42:20 -0400, zen cycle
<funkmasterxx@hotmail.com> wrote:
>

On 3/19/2024 2:37 PM, Jeff Liebermann wrote:

On Tue, 19 Mar 2024 05:46:49 -0400, zen cycle
<funkmasterxx@hotmail.com> wrote:
>

Zipp finally released an analysis of the cause of the crash suffered by
Thomas De Gendt at the UAE tour last month. Yeah, hitting a big-assed
rock (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ICecXdOcTY) will do that.
>
https://www.cyclingnews.com/news/zipp-releases-photos-debunking-hookless-rim-failure-after-de-gendt-crash/
>
Maybe they should have followed tommy's advice and bought the cheap
chinese knock-offs.

>
Now that the real cause has been identified, is there anyone at the
UCI issuing press releases advocating the ban of carbon fiber rims,
forks and frames?  After all, all innovation can be dangerous and
should be banned before the inevitable carnage arrives.

>
Not as of this morning -
https://www.uci.org/press-releases/9WTkI4p7rPgHZhBZvWpZj
>
Adam Hansen (president of the riders union) is still railing against the
technology, though it doesn't seem like this incident is going to give
him much ammunition.

>
Well, it is a convenient way to get his name into the media stream.
That's rather surprising as he seems to believe that getting media
attention is more important than admitting that the early speculation
was wrong and that the demand for a ban was highly premature.  I was
rather disappointed that the discussion hasn't drifted in the
direction of carbon fiber "safety".  Oh well.

 I'm still not sure just how much influence the CPA has over much of anything. Making noise is one sure way to get attention, but it remains to be seen IMHO if Mr. Hansen is merely tilting at windmills.
 

>

Yes, the first step to solving a problem really is to assign the
blame.  I worked for a company which practiced that no problem can be
solved or even investigated without first blaming someone.

>
At my company, the digression follows the same predictable path
>
- customer reports a problem
- marketing/sales blames engineering
- engineering shows either a manufacturing defect or incorrect customer
application
- marketing orders engineering to fix it anyway

>
That works.  The first step is to blame someone, but they can't blame
the person or group that is responsible for fixing the problem.
Therefore, they need to find someone innocent and/or uninvolved to
receive the blame.  It also can't be someone who signs the paychecks,
which generally eliminates all the various "decision makers".  In the
distant past, I would ruin the meeting by volunteering to accept the
blame so that we could move on to properly analyzing and then solving
the problem.  That didn't end the bickering, but was fun for a while.
If that didn't work, I would keep myself entertained estimating the
total cost in salaries for having everyone attend a useless meeting.

 I'm fortunate here in that management trusts my assessments. It wasn't always that way, and changed significantly for the better when we hired a new director of QC a few years ago. He reviewed the outstanding issues that had yet to be signed off by management, and noted that my Root Cause Failure Analysis were all correct, and for the most part implemented my corrective action suggestions. I think it went a long way that in nearly every case I identified either a process or a specification failure rather than trying to blame an individual.
 My favorite professional quote is from Dogbert - "I'll develop a process which will compensate for your sloth, apathy, and overall incompetence".
 

Drivel:  I used to think that the cheap Chinese knock-offs were junk
because the factory or designers didn't have the time or money to do a
proper job.  That was probably true until about 2015, when I started
seeing something rather different.  Before 2015, such products really
were junk when first release, but tended to improve over the life of
the product.  Now, I'm seeing the initial shipments being quite well
designed and built, but later shipments tend to progress toward junk
or worse.  In other words, the Chinese contract manufacturers do have
the talent, time and money to do it right the first time.  However,
once the contracts are signed and the initial reviews are posted to
multiple web sites, it's now time to cut quality, reduce costs, and
sell junk.  It's a strange world we live in.

>
It isn't strange, it's business. We experience much the same with cast
metal and injection molded ABS/PC parts we get from china. First Article
Inspection parts are always well within tolerance and beautifully
finished. It's everything after that you have to watch out for - even
with CoCs accompanying each shipment.

>
Yep.  I'm seeing the same thing.  It wasn't always like that.  At one
point, about 1978, my employer was private labeling marine radios from
Japan.  The first articles were hand crafted, hand solder and looked
like something from Japan circa 1950.  However, the next container
full of radios showed major incremental improvements.  The spaghetti
wiring became a flex PCB (printed circuit board).  Phenolic PCBs
switched to G10/FR4.  Front and rear panel wiring was moved to PCBs.
The improvements never seemed to end where each shipment was better
than the previous.  I've seen very little of that since those radios.
Usually, later "improvements" consisted of labor and component cost
reductions and design changes intended to reduce product life.

 Credit Edward Demming for the implementation of process control and continuous improvement cycle philosophy in Japan in the 60's and 70's (PDCA, known these days as DMAIC, or part of general Kaizen or 6sigma philosophies). It's well know that removing hand operations from the manufacturing process dramatically reduces random error errors (vs systemic errors).
 

>
>