In Process Inspection by Dave Harris
Entry Date: 061208
Back to my basics approach again, I can remember joining a small plastics organisation over 10 years ago. I had three patrol auditors working for covering the three shifts, morning, afternoon and nights. The internal scrap at this company was through the roof and in the main from the larger moulding machines which in simple terms resulted in greater losses to the bottom line.
I can still remember being called in the owner’s office and asked to, “sort this out”. Now we had a first-off process in place and each was clearly marked up, signed by my auditor and the machine setter. The first-off’s of course were the result of hundreds of start-up scrap in order to achieve the standard.
I asked the auditor if they had an approved sample signed off by the customer and to my surprise we had. I then checked the sample against the first-off and the later was of a higher quality in all cases. The first action was to use the sample to check the first-off against, this of course after people told me the customer would reject to the sample standard!
This reduced start-up scrap overnight, but we were still not good at spotting scrap at an early stage. I looked at the audit records which were completed as they should have. However, the sampling frequency was that all products were audited twice per shift. They did not take into account how complex the part was, how small the part was, how many impressions, who the customer was or the competency of the operator. Historical data was not used!
The result of this was a simple document was devised that asked a number of pertinent questions,
1) Customer
2) Impressions
3) Operator Competency
4) Customer Sample checked
5) Sample size (this was from twice per shift to every hour)
6) Labelling correct
7) Gauges available and used
8) Operator aware of critical checks.
9) first-off available
So the auditing role was changed from a policeman type of approach to an auditing tool, thus ensuring manufacturing had all the information available to assist them in meeting customer requirements. It also used the complexity of the product, so if it was a 32 impression golf tee, it no longer had the same frequency of a one impression product with high quality standards.
About the author:
This article is submitted by Dave Harris, European Business Improvements founder Contributor and Moderator of the Business Improvement forum. You can reach Dave by clicking the link below:
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