5 Avoidable Quality Control Issues in Heat Treating
No matter what causes poor quality and adds to your waste, scrap, and rework, the result is the same: it ties up resources, wastes time, and costs money. Reducing scrap and rework must be a priority in dealing with your quality control issues.
To drive consistent and sustainable yield, you must create a seamless workflow and understand the role that it plays in throughput, yield, energy, and quality control issues.
In this Technical Tuesday feature written by Bluestreak | Bright AM, learn about common mistakes that lead to quality control issues.
1. Misunderstanding Product Specifications
Information disconnects related to job processing are all too common and problematic. If part-processing specifications aren’t effectively communicated to everyone in the production chain, mistakes can will happen. Paperwork can get lost or be outdated. Change orders may not be updated and communicated all the way to the individual frontline operator level. Corrective actions might be taken one time, but fail to become part of the standard operating procedures, as sometimes they should be.
Each of these avoidable quality control issues is solvable by creating an integrated end-to-end solution for production control, with everyone using the same database of information in real time.
2. Using Improper Tools
A common problem that will create quality control issues is when the wrong tools or improperly calibrated tools are used, including:
- Equipment, furnaces, etc. that are not appropriate for the job
- Equipment/machines that do not comply with the appropriate specification requirements
- Machines and equipment that are not maintained properly (or timely)
- Employees who are not qualified/certified/trained to operate a furnace or piece of equipment
- Testing tools that are inadequate
3. Using Manual Processes
Exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis. This Latin phrase translates to, “The exception confirms the rule in cases not excepted.” But you may be more familiar with the colloquialism, “lost in translation.” When you’re doing things manually, it’s easy for critical details to be either overlooked or lost in translation.
Quality control issues are extremely difficult to manage (and document) when you’re doing things via mostly manual processing. Your processing system must allow for capturing the appropriate information throughout the entire work order operation steps.
4. Failing to Plan
Failing to adequately plan out your work or using generic institutional knowledge, rather than your own actual production facility facts and operational data to make decisions, can lead to waste and ineffective decision-making.
Planning should include having an eye on continuous improvement in every department and production work center. Proper prior planning precludes poor performance (the 6 P’s of planning). This cannot be done unless you have the right system in place. One that provides the right information to the right people at the right time and collects the right information (in real time) as the work is being done.
5. Failing to Document
Companies that effectively improve their overall quality, reduce rework, and improve throughput and equipment utilization involve everyone in the production chain to document and evaluate each step in your processes. Bottlenecks and the cause of continuous processing errors cannot be determined and alleviated without properly documenting what actually happens in each step of processing.
It is crucial that you have an effective heat treat-specific manufacturing execution system and quality management system (MES/QMS) implemented in your organization that successfully addresses all five of these more common quality control issues. Also, using electronic job travelers (work orders) will reduce the amount of error-prone paper documents that flow throughout your production facility, while allowing your operators to enter the required information that feeds continuous improvement and verifies/validates compliance adherence. Additionally, outside auditors are always looking for better and meaningful documentation for your various production processes.
How to Tell If Your Quality Control Plan Is Failing
Unacceptable levels of scrap and rework may be two of the most obvious signs, but there are other warning signs that you should look for that indicate that your quality control plan needs work.
These include:
- Missed deadlines and budgets
- Higher than normal maintenance and/or support costs
- Defect related repairs or rework
- Failed audits (or too many audit findings)
- Customer complaints
- Failure to meet customer demands (or compliance with specification requirements)
These are often symptoms of an inefficient quality control and production Process. You’ll need to attack the root cause of the symptom if you expect to effectively change things. Don’t just mask the symptoms with temporary workarounds.
And don’t continue to ‘limp’ along with inadequate production control and quality management systems when, deep down inside, you know your business needs a better software system implemented as soon as possible. When the quality control plan is flawed (or lacks individual operator accountability), your operation ultimately pays the price.
Practice Proactive Quality Control
An integrated quality control/quality assurance system helps you better manage the many service-based heat treating processes for many different types of parts and sets the stage for continuous improvement. If you wait to react until problems become obvious, it’s too late, and you may have already lost a key customer to your competition. Reducing quality control issues requires a proactive approach.
Conclusion
Avoiding quality control issues within the various types of heat treat processes requires a proactive approach. Look for early warning signs, and take steps to make changes before they grow into bigger problems.
It’s essential to look at quality control issues holistically. Examine the entire production process from start to finish, analyzing each step along the way. It can be extremely challenging when you’re doing things manually on spreadsheets or utilizing software that’s been adapted from another industry. That’s because using the wrong software, i.e., ERP/MRP systems where the primary focus is inventory management or other outdated systems, typically requires expensive customizations (if they are even possible) to adequately handle the various heat treating workflow requirements.
About the Author: Bluestreak’s QMS was designed 15 years ago exclusively for the heat treating industry to drive quality control management from the front office directly to the production floor, with additional functionality added monthly, based on heat treat customer feedback. For more information, contact Bluestreak.
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