Our Article Library

The question posed in the title, “are you a clicker or a stickler,” encourages you to examine just how apt you are to “click through” the steps in front of you versus carefully reviewing each item. Moreover, you should ask – are people in my organization paying attention to the details or are they functioning on autopilot? If you’re concerned it’s the latter, then you need to build a better culture among your team.

Building a Quality Culture

First, it’s important to keep in mind that learning is a process. Given the opportunity, most employees are eager to learn. I have found the following method effective for teaching employees and helping them learn. It is called the EDGE method. This article focuses on its final E, but for those unfamiliar with the method, EDGE stands for:

• Educate – Explain the reasons, rules, and conditions.
• Demonstrate – Show how to perform the task.
• Guide – Have the learner physically complete each step.
• Evaluate – Assess the learner’s performance and provide feedback.

Weekly inspections are required by ANSI/TPI 1. Whether you take part in a third-party program or not, it is particularly important to regularly inspect your manufacturing product. A deliberate and effective method is required to achieve an effective tool to monitor your product. If your program lacks effective control and is missing review, it could create significant liability for you and your company. Most component manufacturers utilize ANSI/TPI 1 Chapter 3 in varying methods and believe they can safely assume the program will catch any issues that could increase liability. But, have you considered or analyzed if your program is effective? A good third-party auditor can assess this qualification; however, if you’re not using a third-party auditor, how do you evaluate your in-house program?

The biggest issue I have found, regardless of whether the program is recorded on paper or electronically, is the occasional tendency to rush through the process. Maintaining a paper system, in my opinion, makes it slightly easier to identify genuine credentials. Using a digital method is a little more difficult. Using the digital method, the record is created with a uniform and consistent reporting mechanism. This report has some benefits over paper, but its design makes it quite easy to click, click, click through an inspection. If you are using paper or digital, how can you evaluate the process? What are the “tells” that will help you determine if further investigation is necessary?

The easiest way to evaluate the process is to witness your employee conduct an inspection. Your third party should consider doing this when genuine in-house inspections are in question.

Here are some questions to ask.

1. Does the inspector have the right tools? Recently, I witnessed an in-house inspector conduct their inspection without a tape measure. How did they verify the length and height of the component? This is a requirement of each inspection regardless of the method used.
2. How relaxed is the in-house inspector with the flow of their inspection? If an inspector does this every week, they should, over time, develop a recognizable pattern. Keep in mind that monitoring a worker impacts their performance and could cause some uncomfortable performance metrics.
3. Did they spend enough time looking at each segment of the examination? In conversation with a recent convert to digital QC, the worker commented to me that what used to take him 20 minutes now takes less than two minutes. I’m here to tell you that a two-minute inspection is impossible even for an extraordinarily talented and experienced inspector.
4. How did they examine the opposite face of the truss? Often, I am confronted with the statement “if the truss is too long, I cannot inspect the back side of the truss.” This is an extremely concerning statement. Long trusses, I might argue, require closer scrutiny!
5. Does the paper appear to have been just printed? You should question how a much paper system is being used if the pages lack crinkles or creases, dirty fingerprints, plant dust particles, or even occasional water marks from rain or tears!
6. What is the time stamp on the documentation? I once saw a month’s worth of weekly inspection reports and drawings where the date and time coding showed everything was printed within a 10-minute time window. I always considered this impossible. How did the in-house inspector predict what trusses they would be inspecting? How is it possible for everything to be in sequential order? This is one thing digital is great at documenting – the inspection logs the start of the inspection. (Too bad the system does not document the closing of the inspection, which would be an extremely helpful piece of data we could use to evaluate inspections.)

The Bottom Line

Hurrying through weekly inspections will create false confidence, allowing problems to go unnoticed and exposing the company to costly liability. Ineffective oversight creates a formula for failure. To truly protect your business and your bottom line, make sure you have sticklers and not just clickers.

An ANSI/TPI 1 3rd Party Quality Assurance Authorized Agent covering the Southeastern United States, Glenn Traylor is an independent consultant with over four decades of experience in the structural building components industry. Glenn serves as a trainer-evaluator-auditor covering sales, design, PM, QA, customer service, and production elements of the truss industry. He also provides project management specifically pertaining to structural building components, including on-site inspections, expert witness and ANSI/TPI 1 compliance assessments. Glenn provides new plant and retrofit designs, equipment evaluations, ROI, capacity analysis, and CPM analysis.