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assembly operations.39
B&L Ireland and B&L Hong Kong relied upon their respective
operators to perform their functions and responsibilities proper-
ly. If those operators had failed to perform them properly, the
sunglasses assembled by those companies would not have met B&L's
quality standards or the appearance and fit expectations of the
ultimate consumers of quality sunglasses. While some operator
errors, such as failure to make an appropriate adjustment during
the truing process or failure to correct a lens gap problem, were
able to be fixed through reworking the sunglasses, many operator
errors, such as chipped lenses or broken solder on the endpieces,
required the damaged parts to be scrapped and replaced. As the
operators at B&L Ireland and B&L Hong Kong became more experi-
enced at assembling particular SKUs, the operators became skilled
at reducing damage to the parts and meeting B&L's specifications
for quality. They tended to learn, for example, (1) how much
pressure to apply to a part in order to bend it without breaking
or otherwise damaging it; (2) how much to adjust the speed and
temperature controls on the heating tunnel in order to make the
plastic fronts sufficiently malleable to insert lenses without
overheating the fronts; (3) how to recognize and correct lens gap
39 B&L Hong Kong also undertook certain actions to improve the
quality problems it suffered during the first year (viz., 1983)
of its sunglass assembly operations.
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