NPI and ECM

NPI means "New Product Introduction (process)"

I suspect that ECM does not mean "Electronic Counter Measures", but you never know.

Why -- you've heard a rumor that you're going to lay yourself off, and you want to find a new job before the ax falls?

NPI = New Product Introduction which means they should be willing to put in copious overtime when the project flounders. (or maybe No Pun Intended).

ECM = Enterprise Content Management which means they can do some documentation management.

A bit more:

"ECM is an umbrella term covering document management, Web content management, search, collaboration, records management, digital asset management (DAM), workflow management, capture and scanning."

In other words, the applicant will not get a personal secretary.

Den onsdag den 23. september 2015 kl. 21.28.33 UTC+2 skrev John Larkin:

probably the usual, something that the pointy haired bosses think sounds impressive, it moves obscene amounts of money to some consulting company while every one else tries to work around it to keep things running

-Lasse

OSC = Only Superman Qualified

New Product Introduction and Electronic Change Management.

It's code for "must be able to talk to six-sigma people without losing your cool."

reminds me of this:

-Lasse

I thought that fad had run its course twenty years ago.

Den torsdag den 24. september 2015 kl. 02.13.22 UTC+2 skrev krw:

I know it was it was at some point revived as "digital six-sigma"

-Lasse

Here are just a few of the things that a customer is asking us about. Note, it's established that this customer won't make efforts to fix actual quality problems.

Are Western Electric rules applied to detect out-of-control conditions?

Is a Measurement System Analysis conducted for each gauge used in capability studies?

Do shop travelers show evidence of review to meet customer requirements?

Are PFMEAs created for each part number or product family?

Are Control Plans created for each part number or product family?

Is staff trained in 8D/PDCA/DMAIC,etc methodology?

Is "5-Whys" methodology used?

Does 8D/PDCA address both root cause of defect as well as root cause of escape?

Is effectiveness of customer focus program measured?

Are effective metrics used to maintain measurements of customer satisfaction?

timetable is established for accomplishing them?

Are Value Stream Mapping events held?

Are DFMEA tools/techniques employed?

Are tools or design concepts, such as DFSS or DOE (Design for Six Sigma/Design of Experiments) employed?

Are DFMEAs developed by a core cross-functional team that includes members from all relevant departments (e.g. design, quality, manufacturing, production)?

Is ownership of manufacturability maintained from cradle to grave when required?

Are Gate Reviews held prior to moving on to next stage of design maturity?

Are area/country differences in available raw working materials with comparable recommendations readily known and transferrable to the customer?

Our gear has a zero failure rate on over 1e7 unit hours in the field. They gave us an "F" on our quality audit.

Sounds like a "no bid" situation. I'd tell them the same. No way would I work in such a place.

They may be asking for superman, but I suspect that may be a side effect of how the job descriptions are assembled. In the days before the internet, when dinosaurs roamed the land and where newspaper and magazine advertisements where the main form of recruitment, companies found that they had several problems. Evil scoundrels, such as myself, would carefully read the job postings for information on what a company was doing. It was easy enough to guess what new products were being developed from the specialties required. Sometimes the company name wasn't mentioned, but a letter or phone call would eventually reveal the name or at least their location.

To complicate matters, stock holders and investment analysts would use the number of job ads as a sign of company "health" and would produce dire predictions of an impending collapse, should there be even a tiny reduction in their frequency. Even in the depths of various recessions, many publicly held companies would continue to advertise for technical and managerial positions, while laying off large numbers of the same specialties. Perception is everything.

To solve these (and other) problems, companies would obfuscate their job postings to include irrelevant and misleading requirements. Fortunately, they usually did that by simply appending this junk after the initial list of real requirements, making decoding the job posting fairly easy. I wasn't quite sure of this until I attended a series of interviews at a marathon job faire and noticed that some recruiters had lines drawn through their copy of the job listings, separating the real requirements from the junk.

The result of all this was a general impression that many companies only hired supermen that were expected to do anything and everything. The reality is that the job postings are the bait to attract marginal applicants, so that the company managers can sift through the catch and pick out any of the unqualified which might be useful. At one interview, I was confronted with a wall size company organizational chart, while two recruiters debated into which box I could be made to fit.

That was all a long time ago and long before the internet, which I'm sure has had some effect on job descriptions and hiring. Yet, I suspect much of this is still in place and quite applicable.

It's fairly obvious that your company is not expected to pass this quality audit. Even the largest corporation could not possibly have all those programs in place. What you are expected to do is lie. After you win the contract, the listed program requirements either evaporate or are drastically reduced in quantity and scope. If you fail to lie, you would be judged "non compliant" and will be disqualified from the bidding process. Welcome to the dark side.

Quality figures are expected to be produced by an independent third party, statistically analyzed by a handy grad student, audited by a well known accounting firm, published in an obscure journal, and certified Kosher by the local rabbi. You probably won't recognize your figures after this process, which works well for companies trying to hide a dismal record, but fails badly for those that actually have a quality product. The system is not on your side.

Well, we ship stuff and they pay for it. We can ignore the "F" score.

No way

They have a lot of turnover, which is why we can help.

I interviewed at HP once. The guy looked at my resume, gave me a sour look, and said "You've got to make up your mind if you're an engineer or a programmer." The interview was basically over at that point.

I think a lot of companies have a big impressive "careers" page, even if they aren't hiring. It looks good to investors and such.

I was asked much the same question, but in a positive way.

My answer was that it had proven quite useful to be bilingual.

I did get the job, which was for embedded realtime programming. The language was assembly code.

Joe Gwinn (BS EE, later MS CS)

I think you are a bit cynical. In DoD work there were many "processes" to assure quality. Some were useful, some not so much. But we *never* paid lip service to them. In fact, we sometimes carried them too far.

I once was asked to do a timing analysis of the bus on a DSP chip. That meant checking the timing of every device on the bus. In the process I found where a Flash EPROM was 5 ns out of spec on one timing parameter. This was in a board about to go into production. I told the engineer responsible for the transition. I was told the unit had passed all the qualification tests as if that meant it didn't matter that there was a failure to meet the data sheet requirements on a part. I expect there was a requirement somewhere to meet all the data sheet specs for every part used, but I wasn't aware of it and that wasn't actually my project, so I let it drop.

The point is they relied too much on meeting all the specified tests and procedures and forgot an engineering detail. Quality requirements

Vastly over cynical...

Maybe. If you were a large corporation interested in doing business with a contractor and getting involved in their QA process, how would you phrase the questions? I would simply ask "Which QA processes do you have in place and how can our company monitor the processes?" The prospective bidder would then itemize what they were actually doing. You don't need a list of in order to produce a workable answer.

However, you do need a list in order to disqualify a contractor. What I see is a list of the corporations favorite QA processes, documentation standards, and oversight handling procedures. The wording is such that a potential contractor is expected to answer every single question. If I wanted to prepare a list of potential discrepancies sufficient to disqualify a contractor, that's exactly what I would do.

The questions are framed in a mildly adversarial manner, where a negative response might be expected to produce a withdrawl of the bid by the contractor. An inexperienced contractor might take one look at the list and correctly suspect that they could never do all the items listed. Or, they might innocently add the cost of doing all the things on the list, and end up seriously overbidding. Only a contractor that knows in advance which QA processes the large corporation will demand, has a chance of producing an accurate bid. If the questions were not intended to force a prospective contractor to lie, they certainly seem to be framed to intimidate or produce an overbid.

I guess I should point out that I've had some personal experience in such bidding and contracts. However, I can't disclose the story because I still do business with at least one of the culprits.

ARgh... late for lunch.

And, you are VERY lucky to not be working for them! It is obvious they care WAY more about meaningless paperwork than what you actually would provide them. Also, they may well be ready to go out of business for the above reason.

Jon