In many organizations, the people doing the value-adding work for customers in engineering, production, distribution or any other function that creates value often try to hide problems so they don't "get in trouble." Don' let this happen. These problems are your keys to finding the process problems that need repair and are the fuel for continuous improvement (CI) efforts. Almost all of the nonconformance issues that arise in an organization are the result of a broken process, not the performance of the people. In spite of this, the people using the process are often blamed for the nonconformance so there is an incentive to cover up or hide these problems. When that happens, you lose the opportunity to employ your CI tools to find and correct the deficiency in your process.
