Field technician: Where does the grey wire from terminal 21 go?
Engineer: Grey? That wire should be light blue.
Field technician: All the wires I see are grey.
This is what happens when the talented but willful production team takes engineering directives as suggestions. Decisions regarding component selection are informed by specifications, regulations, physical laws, and personal preference. Regardless of how a decision was arrived at (fortune cookies, dice rolling, asking the janitor, etc.), it is not the place of production to second-guess engineering. If it was, then they would be the ones in a windowless office under flickering fluorescents, surrounded by productivity-increasing bland grey furnishings.
I am not talking about problems reported back to engineering for correction. I am talking about laborers thinking they will use a solenoid in place of the one you specified, because it looks similar and has the same voltage rating, and then not telling anybody.
Excuses like "I ran out of blue wire," "It's almost identical," and my favorite, "That's not how we used to do it," are not valid excuses. I can't even think of a valid excuse. In this particular case, a multimillion-dollar fire suppression system was to be installed throughout a manufacturing facility. This location routinely bursts into flames, they use kerosene as a lubricant. Fire breaks out, CO2 floods the area, workers have just enough time to escape certain suffocation. The control panels for this facility were being repaired and upgraded, when some questions arose. As they gave the opening exchange, above, they had replaced control panels wiring with some grey wire that looked "like the same stuff." After an argument over the wire, the engineer's demands won out. The project was on hold until the proper wire was obtained.
How do we assist the field tech or customer when documentation does not match the physical design in the field? An adulterated design which may later require the ministrations of a technician because production took liberties during construction.
You're right about asking the factory floor to tell you if it doesn't look right. I invite everyone to tell me their impressions on a new design. If a screw is hard to access, if something is difficult to service, or even, "gee, we used to have a wire that was this color, can we change it?" Of course you can't design by committee, and that's a terrible trap to fall into, but you can design a product that's built for production, service and the customer. There's a hidden agenda, too. I found that Production, Purchasing and Service would issue Engineering Change Notifications to alter product attributes to their preference. What's worse is that the ECNs would be signed off by Production Engineering and Development Engineering had no way of knowing what was changed. Sure enough, substandard parts would be substituted by Purchasing, and Production would stream-line a process that destroyed product integrity.
If you can get the other departments input during the prototype stage you can tell them why a component or process is specified.
@tekochip: That sounds like a bad ECR approval process, if design engineering had no input (or if production engineering could substitute for design engineering -- along the lines of, "If dad says no, go ask mom.")
I have found, through painful experience, the importance of having a well-thought-out process for approval of ECRs and deviation requests. At one place I worked, approval to use non-conforming parts only required the signature of one engineer -- any engineer -- and there was no documentation of the non-conformance other than "OK TO USE PER [ENGINEER'S NAME HERE]."
One engineer (who had a master's degree from MIT, and was not a dumb guy by any means) would sign these requests without even reading them.
It comes down to laziness, going home early, taking the path of least resistance. Even if you pay people more, they will only care for a little bit. Hence, future raises.
Scaring employees into working hard is how Apple and some other companies keep their engineers working diligently. Otherwise, more will try to find a place to nap on the job. I should know, found some nappers under their desks.
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