5 Important Rules for Controlling Quality in Manufacturing

In modern-day manufacturing, quality has become a key objective for many manufacturers looking to improve their reputation and maintain a competitive advantage in the market. Quality control is defined by the process of evaluating the output of an operation to a standard and taking corrective action when the output does not meet the standard.

More and more companies are realizing that having products of high quality is essential for the success of their business and the satisfaction of their customers. Not only will customers be more likely to purchase products from your company again, having quality control measures provides other benefits such as ensuring the safety of the consumer.

While quality is essential, achieving a supreme level of quality usually comes with a price increase. This is why Toyota and Honda have allocated a substantial amount of time to develop strategies to cut manufacturing costs while ensuring products of high quality. Within this blog, we are going to discuss 5 important rules that pertain to controlling quality within a manufacturing operation.

5 Important Rules for Controlling Quality in Manufacturing

Here are 5 important rules for controlling quality in manufacturing:

• Check Quality at Multiple Steps - It can be tricky to find the right balance of how much quality checks you should perform to ensure that you are delivering products of high quality to your customers. On one hand, performing quality checks early on or at every step would ensure that defects are rejected as early as possible. On the other hand, adding quality control at every production step may not be feasible and may be too costly. At minimum, there should be quality control performed as raw materials and components arrive to the production facility and when the final product is finished and ready to ship out.
• Eliminating Pass or Fail - Another important aspect to ensure that you are producing items of high quality is to turn away from simple pass/fail indicators. This indicator provides little to no information about cases where one or more technical parameters of the item is just within the allowed tolerance. Instead, manufacturers should record actual values so that they can make data-driven decisions and work toward improving the production process and reduce the number of low-quality items.
• Increase Visibility - Visibility is a key component within manufacturing operations. The manufacturing process is a chain of separate events but dependent assembly and testing processes, which ultimately come together toward a final product. A prevalent issue is having a technical problem in stage one, only to be discovered in a later stage, ultimately holding the product up. This is why visibility within your operation is a must. You should expect tests results from any of your manufacturing stages to influence other stages in the process. In order to see the entire picture, it is important to collect and analyze the end to end results and frequency of each problem.
• Predictions - There are many factors that can go wrong during the manufacturing process that could affect the quality of your products. Developing knowledge and expertise about your processes over the years allows you to make predictions about what could potentially occur and how that could affect your production. Setting up preventative mechanisms and contingency plans can ensure that these don’t occur. They can also ensure that your production are set up to reduce the amount of things that could go wrong. 
• Continuous Improvement - When you are able to collect enough information and data on the quality of your items, you can start to identify trends or operations that are causing issues or are not performing as well as they should. If one step of the operation is causing most of the issues, additional care should be taken to change this production step to reduce the amount of defects it produces. Over time, the overall quality of the products will increase and you will have less waste and less need for rework.  

PlanetTogether’s Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) software is a powerful tool to help manufacturers control and enhance the quality within their organization. An APS software allow manufacturers to effectively allocate the best resources to perform the operation. Enhancing the efficiency of production and improving the production processes will help cut costs and reduce waste. 

Our quality has improved as a result. The software assigns the best person to the job.

DICK MARX, MATERIALS MANAGER, KNAPHEIDE TRUCK EQUIPMENT

 

Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) Software

Advanced Planning and Scheduling Softwares have become a must for modern-day manufacturing operations as customer demand for increased product assortment, fast delivery, and downward cost pressures become prevalent. These systems help planners save time while providing greater agility in updating ever-changing priorities, production schedules, and inventory plans. APS Systems can be quickly integrated with an ERP/MRP software to fill the gaps where these systems lack planning and scheduling flexibility, accuracy, and efficiency.

With PlanetTogether APS you can:

• Create optimized schedules that balance production efficiency and delivery performance
• Maximize throughput on bottleneck resources to increase revenue
• Synchronize supply with demand to reduce inventories
• Provide company-wide visibility to resource capacity
• Enable scenario data-driven decision making

The implementation of an Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) Software will take your manufacturing operations to the next level of production efficiency by taking advantage of the operational data you already possess in your ERP system. APS is a step in the right direction of efficiency and lean manufacturing production enhancement. Try out a free trial or demo!