What they should have done after you had proven you could easily "make them all this way" is to set you up as a trainer/procedure writer to make sure the process on how to "make them right" was documented.... But the second important stop is with Engineering - to ensure the parts specs and BOM were all correct... There have been some spectacular failures and gigantic warranty costs over what was simply sloppy Engineering record keeping....
They were not set up that way. The project engineer was against any idea submitted by the peons. (he wasn't the only engineer in my acquaintance who felt non-engineers were not capable of coming up with better ways of doing things. Every unit had to go through preliminary test, burn in and a final test before it was ready for shipping.
Back to the engineer, after another company bought us, my application as a field service technician for another division was accepted. Not long after that information came to me the engineer was "let go" because of working with vendors, "for a fee," to approve out of spec parts.
On a new line of equipment a motor driver was in an "undetermined state" when the unit was powered on. Sometimes it would come up in a mode that would drag down the power supply and prevent the unit from turning on. With a quick power of power on cycle everything would come up fine. When this was mentioned to a higher up, they assured me it wasn't a problem and don't worry. About a week later one of the customer service people came to me and asked about how to get around the problem. He had a customer that got a unit that wouldn't power on. In another week they had a work around to put in the system to prevent the problem.
The company was just all around bad news. There was an omen of this on the day of my job interview, my mother passed away. The company that bought us out wasn't too bad, but they were also stuck in their ways with no incentive to change. One example was they made what passed for copiers before the days of Xerox. When the Xerox process was first being developed they had an opportunity to purchase the rights. Management felt it wasn't as viable a process as the chemical coated paper copying system they manufactured.
jtk
"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty."
- Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)