Ever look forward to a fight or argument at work?

There are ways around that. Better quality control of the material. You can purchase quality Birch plywood with better control of thickness, but it will cost. Seems to me your company is trying to keep the cost way down, thus why the thickness is all over the place?

Your supplier should be able to tell you what the thickness should be. They have a general idea.

Good luck with your upcoming argument!

I don't have a specific instance to relate, but certainly find myself in this situation from time to time.

Usually it revolves around someone insisting that we don;t have the time or money to do it "right" in the first place.

Then, later into the project, we spend even more money and take even more time to resolve issues that could have been avoided.

Bill Lacey wrote:

 

 

So I'm just sitting here, smiling, waiting, eager for the opportunity to get into it with him and upper management about why they need to get out of my way and let me do what I need to do to eliminate this problem. I've never wanted to get into a verbal fight so much prior to this. And I honestly can't wait.

I read this and laughed out loud - loudly.

I hear you Bill. We have this argument all the time. I told them we can make it to the thickness that you specify but need to standardized on the thickness so we can have a library of assemblies ready to go. We do good for a few months but they will change supplier because they are cheaper and the thickness changes. Drawers do not line up and the drawer faces have to big of a gap. Our biggest thing right now is slides. They have changed suppliers three different times. They all say they match all the other slide dimensions till we go and assemble. I usually send the e-mail out and give to head of design with my supporting e-mails and sit back and listen till I blow up inside.

At one job, everyday I just keep thinking about how to piss off one of the coworker.

Had a few yelling and screaming.  That coworker did that to the owner and his sister also.  There is only 4 of us.

You need a QC department and it will be ugly.  Since nobody at your place care about what they're doing.

Make it ISO9000 and get rid of half the people.

You need to sit down with management and get the material sort out.  If they want to listen.

If not, just have fun and watch the firework.

Ever look forward to a fight or argument at work?

No.

"Winning" is not an option. Losing some or losing more are the available opportunities from a fight at work.

  Unfortunately, we work for corporate America. It's their ball, their bat and their ball field. We either play by their rules or go find another team to play for. Pick and choose your battles wisely. You may win the battle, but still get fired in the end for ticking off the wrong person. I'm not advocating that you just let someone walk all over you but, you need to CYOA (cover you own a**) in such a fashion that no one in management can point their finger back at you for their poor decisions. With todays technology, emails stating your insight and warnings of pending failures in situations such as you have mentioned is a good way to CYOA. Carbon copy several different people when sending out emails. This way no one can deny that such a warning was sent. Don't ever delete someone's response. Make a folder inside of Outlook and store their responses the folder with their name on it.

  There is a principle that exist throughout a majority of corporate America that states, "you don't need to understand the work that someone does to manage them, you just need to understand people". This is a load of bovine fecal matter. As management has become more distanced from manufacturing the problem you discussed has only gotten worse. I believe that every person in a company needs to spend at least two years of hands on experience within his or her specific field of expertise  (manufacturing, engineering, design) before they are ever allowed to step into a office position. Now days more importance is placed on a having a four year degree than the knowledge acquired by someone that has been doing a specific job for thirty plus years and understands every aspect of that job. Over the 40 year span of my career as a tool and die maker and a tooling engineer, I witnessed the very same type of things you have mentioned. Managements inability to listen and heed warnings. If I may offer a word of wisdom to all, "as long as your paycheck clears at the end of the week, let management do their thing, and in the mean time, look for another team to play for." It may just save your sanity!

Sounds to me like your PM has pointy hair.

You sound like you have good ideas, but trouble conveying them and convincing others of their value. Unfortunately that is your problem, not theirs, and getting into an argument over it is not the right approach. May I suggest you read this?

give em hell bill.  I found the same problems with threads out in the shop and there was no way I could get consistent results from my model to the actual parts.  all that from a +/- 1 thread tolerance.  I just about gave up on that fight and had to come up with multiple parts to try and meat the welded dims once the threads where fused. 

From my experience it never ends up working out.

Returning to your management with the mindset of "I told you so" never ends up working as it'll just make them hostile towards you.

Re-propose your ideas as solutions to their problem but avoid going in with the mentality of "if you had just done this the first time"

Now if they are upset with you for not foreseeing this problem then sure CYOA but otherwise try to be non-combative.

WOW.

    Not sure that it is fighting, but I will stick by what I have put together and argue why up to a point. At the end not matter how crazy or how much time it takes I will do what I was told to add two hidden lines, to double dim, or what ever it was that seemed so worth while to put a foot down.  Never had it as bad as Rick, I would not have put up with that,  10 bosses, heck they should have just make Rick the boss..

yall have a great night time to hit the books.

Be right; lose anyhow.