Deming/SPC case study question

[Aaron Jones <aaronj@stylecraft.com>]

Hello folks,

I am a Production Manager for an upholstered furniture manafacturer.  Almost
all of our quality issues are subjective (i.e. the cushion is too soft, that
gap is a little too big, the ottoman is a little to crooked, there isn't
enough fiber in that back, etc).  We try to set standards whereever
possible, but sometimes it simply isn't possible to do.  Believe me, I wish
we could.

Here is my dillemma that isn't allowing me to sleep at night.  We have 16,
6-man upholstery lines.  In the old "QC/upholstery system", we had one QC do
100 % inspection for 2 lines, and one Lead upholstery person in charge of
the production of that line.  The lead would be responsible for training,
expediting repairs, disciplining his people, and do some production every
day.  The lead and QC were required to work together every day and it was a
disaster.

The lead got accused of not being timely enough on calling a line worker
down to fix a repair set aside by the QC.  The lead got accused of not
stopping the production line timely enough when a frame problem cropped up.
Then the QC got accused of being too picky or too inconsistent (because of
our subjectiveness).   Regardless, this was a real mess, and we were
required to do something about it to fix it.  

One other note:  We did/do weekly audits where we check 2 pieces per QC per
week.  However, the QC checks nearly 650 pieces per week.  Is this 2 pieces
per week a good basis for SPC expecially when the 4 people doing the audit
can't all agree if that problem is "bad enough" or "good enough"
quality...again...the subjectiveness.

Now, the plan I came up with as a production manager did not make the QC
manager happy, because my plan actually displaced his QC people.  What I did
was to combine the functions of the QC/Lead person, so they were one in the
same.  Our Leads became the QC people, and still took care of the minor
problems on the line.  There were so many positives in this new system,
because all the bickering went away, the line people respected the quality
decisions much better, because now the decisions came from their boss, we
had better throughput, etc.

However, the problem with this system is that it has 2 bosses.  Each lead/qc
must answer to a QC supervisor and a production supervisor.  Let's remember
that the QC manager has all the power to make this fail, especially since
that person was not on board from the start...what I'm saying is that I
believe he could make it fail if he wanted to.  With the new system, we
ended up saving over 4 people's wages for the company, have created a better
working atmosphere, BUT our audit reject percentage has gone up from an
average of 40% to 60%.  I am in the audits and I truly believe that the QC
manager and supervisor (who run the audits) have gotten more picky in order
for this new system to fail, so we could get the plant manager to tell us to
go back the old way of doing things because our quality is slipping, but I
absolutely do not believe it is.  

Please help.  Is there anything wrong first with how we perform these
audits??  Also, how can I mount a case to the GM to allow us to keep this
new system??

Thanks,
Aaron

Thank you,
Aaron