Overview

If you are a designer or developer or engaged in sales work, do you really understand the problems of your production group? If you are in production, how much do you know about the engineering work done elsewhere in your company? How does production fit into the rest of the business?

What happens if nobody else understands the producers? Or the producers can't see what the others are doing?

Here is a not uncommon situation that I ran across while in design work. Our design engineering group was responsible for several large equipment projects in various stages of development, design, and production. We were working with a corresponding manufacturing group that built the products we designed. The relations between these two groups, jointly responsible for a large segment of the company's product area, could only be described as hostile. Whenever difficulty arose in production or test, the manufacturing people made every effort to blame it on "engineering"; and the designers tried similarly to show that it was "manufacturing's" fault.

More effort was devoted to fixing blame than to straightening out problems. Earlier the manager of manufacturing had ordered off the factory floor several design engineers who were attempting to work out a solution for some production difficulties. In turn, the design engineers were almost contemptuous of the manufacturing engineers' knowledge and abilities. When I first called on my new counterpart, the manager of the manufacturing group, he was barely civil. Production was almost at a standstill.

Over a period...