When Walker finished his escalating diatribe, a silence, thick as smoke, fell on the room. No one dared to move, say anything, look him in the eye, or even breathe.
"Let's proceed," he said.
Everyone breathed.
"A few notable reds." Dunwood paused for a brief second to clear his throat again. "One is in the area of retention of high-performing personnel."
"How many did we lose this month?" Walker asked.
"Two. One was a shift supervisor in the drone assembly line, the other one was the US Navy product quality liaison. They were both top performers; we're sorry to see them leave."
How very interesting, Alex thought.
"Good riddance is what I say," Walker said abruptly. "If they were not thrilled to be here, I, for one, don't see any loss. How are we replacing?"
"We've posted ads, internal and external. We should have an idea on replacement within a couple of weeks," Robin said. "I've tasked human resources recruiting to step on it with this one."
"Who's picking up the slack in the interim?"
"The other shift supervisors are rotating through longer shifts, until the replacement comes in and is trained, and the Army product liaison is also handling the Navy contacts for a while."
"Make sure he doesn't screw this up," Walker said. "If you're not comfortable with his handling of the issue, you do this job yourself, personally, so that I don't have any surprises on the client side. Is this understood?"
"Yes, sir," Dunwood answered in a heartbeat.
"Let's continue with the reds."
Dunwood clicked, advancing his presentation one more slide.
"The next notable red is the hours of testing. We didn't achieve our target of total testing hours for May."
"Which tests didn't achieve and why?" Walker asked.
Dunwood clicked again to display a breakdown of testing scores by product.
"The worst one is the RX series drone, with only 82 percent of required testing hours, followed closed by the SX series drone, with 86 percent. Moving down the list we have NanoGuide in-dash mounts series varying between 89 percent and 93 percent, and—"
"Let's keep it simple," Walker interrupted him, with a tone of voice reeking of sarcasm, "did you make goal on the testing time for any product?"
"Um… the only ones were the MX series of enhanced drones, and the handheld GPS devices."
"So, let me summarize for you," Walker interjected again, "almost all your products failed the required testing time this month." Walker paused briefly, leaving a deafening silence in the room. "Tell me, please, have you seen your wife and kids during the month of May?"
Confused, Dunwood hesitated before answering. "Um… what do you mean?"
"Have you been by your house during the month of May? How often?" Walker rephrased the question in an apparently calm and friendly tone of voice.
"Sure, I go home every night," Dunwood replied hesitantly, not sure where this was going.
"And why would that be?" Walker continued his line of interrogation.
"Excuse me?"
"How dare you go home, how dare any of your incompetent people go home every night, when you're coming in front of me with your testing goals unmet? Testing only requires time, dedication, and willingness to do whatever it takes to achieve results, nothing else. Not only you don't do your job, but you don't even care that you don't!" Walker slammed his fist on the table, startling everyone. "Why didn't you complete testing within the allotted hours?"
"Well, sir, th-th-the t-tests failed in s-some cases," Dunwood started explaining, stammering and slightly trembling under the pressure and the humiliation of this public embarrassment. "W-when a test fails, it takes more time, 'c-cause you have to see what's wrong, t-then f-fix and r-replace and retest, sir."
"So, let's see if I hear you correctly. The tests failed, then you and your less-than-mediocre team ran out of time to retest, then you just threw your arms in the air, said 'oops, sorry, no time left, tough shit,' and just went home to enjoy your pathetic TV dinners, surrounded by your pathetic little families, right?"
Dunwood stood there silently, his chin trembling. There was nothing left to say.
Oh, God, he's going to start crying, Alex thought. Oh, no. Her own boss, Sheppard, looked like an angel now, compared to this maniac.
Walker allowed the uncomfortable silence to continue, as he was looking at everyone, to see if their faces displayed the expected approval. Alex was stunned to see that two people were nodding their heads in approval of Walker's tirade: Robin and Peter. From Robin, an HR professional, Alex would have expected anything but approval for this type of behavior. Peter, as a Six Sigma leader, had to work with Walker every day, so Alex gave him the benefit of the doubt, but Robin was a sad disappointment.
"Let's continue, we're not done yet with the reds, are we?" Walker interrupted the silence.
Clicking ahead, Dunwood displayed a new page, showing a complicated chart.
"The last red is for product quality at the end of the assembly line. It missed target by nine percentage points."
"This is the one you measure before shipping to the users?" Walker clarified.
"Yes, sir, this is the final quality test before the product leaves our facility."
"And you have an almost double-digit miss." Walker paused. "Why?"
Dunwood stood silently, not sure if the question was the beginning of yet another diatribe.
"What causes the double-digit miss? What part of the quality check is failing?"
"Overall, the microchips fail, mostly across the board."
"And how do you explain that?" Walker asked.
"Microchips fail at a higher rate than any other components, regardless of manufacturer or chip type; it's the nature of the product. They always have and always will be."
"Then, what's wrong now?"
"We're seeing a higher-than-average failure rate after install. We check these microchips on the test bank before installing; yet at final quality checks, they fail the tests, at an unexpectedly high rate."
"Why? Why are they failing, do you know?" Walker continued, apparently undisturbed by the news.
"We have to analyze the failures and find the root cause, so we don't know yet. This will take some time," Dunwood said, avoiding Walker's gaze by looking at the slide.
"Can you at least venture a guess?" Walker pressed him.
"The only thing that comes to mind is all the cost-cutting initiatives we have executed in the plant in the past two years. We kept pulling cost out of the processes and the products. That can only go so far without compromising the quality of the product."
"So, how are you planning to fix this? We're almost at the end of June, which means the June failure rates will also be in the shit can, right?"
"That is probably correct, sir, but we are working as fast as possible to contain and fix this. We have a rigorous check at the end of the line, to ensure no damaged product makes it out the door, to the client. We are even holding back those items that borderline pass the test. Just to make sure."
"I bet this is costing me a fortune, isn't it? The entire throwaway inventory, all this scrap? How on earth did you make your budget numbers for the month? Now I know why your waste numbers are in the yellow, but how come budget is in the green?"
"Like I said, sir, it's because of the cost cutting and Six Sigma projects at the plant. We took a lot of cost out of every single area, no stone was left unturned."
"And that's the way it's supposed to be. Could be even better if you wouldn't throw all those defective products down the drain, right?"
"I guess so, but something has got to give. Now we're robbing Peter to pay Paul. We've cut costs so deeply, that it has come back to haunt us in the form of defect rates and scrapped product. If we are to fix this issue, we will probably need to add cost back into the product."