Delivering high-quality products on a deadline and reaching your goals is critical to your success. One way organizations like yours achieve this is through quality control. It ensures that every product you create is up to a pre-defined standard and anything that falls below that standard will never make its way to your customer. Quality control is important to your business for so many different reasons such as reducing the variability of materials, boosting customer loyalty, decreasing waste and cutting costs, and avoiding situations that could lead to expensive liability claims and lawsuits.
Without reliable quality control in place, you will waste money, time, and resources. Even if you think your operations are optimized, there’s always room for improvement. With just a few tweaks to your processes, you can see improvements. That is why we put together these 5 easy tips for improving your quality control on your shop floor.
1. Define Your Quality Standards
Before you start, you’ll want to define what quality means in the first place. Meaning, you will want to set defined parameters for what your quality standards are. From asking yourself how many defects you’re willing to allow, to what your final product should look like, answers to these questions will help you create a clearly defined standard that helps you reduce costs and time.
2. Train Your Employees
To make sure everyone is on the same page, you’ll have to implement this crucial step in your processes by educating your quality control officer and employees. Not only will they help you identify abnormalities, but also well-trained, competent employees can develop ideas for improving efficiency and quality control. More eyes on the floor that are trained to spot defects, abnormalities, or disruptions in your processes, means fewer products that don’t meet your standards will leave your plant and end up in the hands of your customers.
3. Let Technology Help Your Processes
With the digitization of the packaging industry, there is technology available that can make your plant run more efficiently and with higher quality. Having the right systems in place will increase repeatability. If your past jobs have been successful, you may want to continue doing it that way – the right technology will document your past processes to provide you a baseline understanding of what to do and how you do it. However, it’s important to revisit every aspect of quality control, and create custom checklists for every job as you never know when something may change.
4. Upgrade Your Equipment Where Needed
This may be a necessary step to enhance quality. You may just need to fix a single part within a machine, replace outdated equipment that constantly breaks or produces defective products, or upgrade your current systems with modules that help your shop floor increase efficiency and profitability. When changing equipment, you will need to train your employees again.
5. Create a Response Plan
One way of creating a response plan is by hiring an adept quality control officer. They will make the task of improving your quality control less daunting. By fixing the problems that cause defective products, quality control officers can help remedy problems to improve quality over time. Additionally, this employee can conduct 100% of your inspections and AQL audits to ensure your products meet your standards.
Quality control is an integral part of your organization. If you don’t produce products that meet your standards, then everything else is irrelevant. If you don’t have a formal quality control strategy in place, now is a great time to implement one.
Advantzware’s Quality Control (QC) module leverages User Defined Fields so you can create and access custom QC checklists in the shop floor data collection module. Tabs and fields of various types can be entered by your employees and the information will be saved on every job for future reference. Contact us today to learn how you can easily implement this module into your existing ERP system to simplify and streamline your quality control.