Tuesday, November 08, 2005
Responsibility, what's that?
Today I work I was called out to the shop on an interesting mission. We had a problem item from our customer in Seattle, that said we put some parts on the tail together wrong. Me and another guy looked at the horizontal stabilizer where it is built -- a five minute scooter ride away.
What we currently build and what the drawings said seemed to match quite well, so there was no longer a problem. Then he told me what was going on: Up in Seattle someone had damaged it, and so they wrote up a problem, and had us send them some parts to repair it, while making it look like we had messed up. I didn't realize that sort of thing happened, but I guess I have a lot to learn.
What do we do? We say there isn't a problem anymore, and charge Seattle for it. The annoying thing is that we have to make sure that everything is right, and we are doing things correctly -- and it makes a big difference if someone hit it with a forklift after we sent it off, or is one of our people isn't putting the right parts in the right place, every time. The structure is pretty critical -- not as critical as the flight software, (with metal it is easier to see that something isn't going to fit, and over-building is more effective) but the FAA makes sure that we have a system to get everything checked and fixed. But sometimes, people use that system to shift blame, making things more inefficient.
It seems this story should have a moral, so here it is: "Ethix are important. Blaming someone else can really make things hard if they look back at their past and fix the future."
What we currently build and what the drawings said seemed to match quite well, so there was no longer a problem. Then he told me what was going on: Up in Seattle someone had damaged it, and so they wrote up a problem, and had us send them some parts to repair it, while making it look like we had messed up. I didn't realize that sort of thing happened, but I guess I have a lot to learn.
What do we do? We say there isn't a problem anymore, and charge Seattle for it. The annoying thing is that we have to make sure that everything is right, and we are doing things correctly -- and it makes a big difference if someone hit it with a forklift after we sent it off, or is one of our people isn't putting the right parts in the right place, every time. The structure is pretty critical -- not as critical as the flight software, (with metal it is easier to see that something isn't going to fit, and over-building is more effective) but the FAA makes sure that we have a system to get everything checked and fixed. But sometimes, people use that system to shift blame, making things more inefficient.
It seems this story should have a moral, so here it is: "Ethix are important. Blaming someone else can really make things hard if they look back at their past and fix the future."
