Modern manufacturers know that you can’t inspect quality into a product; you must build quality in to the entire manufacturing process. Only when a company fully embraces quality as an integral part of its culture can it hope to realize the revenue and profit enhancing capabilities that come with a reputation for delivering superior quality.
So how do you fully embrace quality?
Supplier Quality Records
The passion for quality must extend across your entire supply chain as well as within the confines of your manufacturing plant. It doesn’t help the overall quality of a product for a plant to have great processes if it is using inferior materials. Your company must communicate its dedication to quality to every member of the supply chain, and quality must become as important a metric for supplier performance as cost and on-time delivery are.
One way to help suppliers understand the sincerity of your company’s commitment to quality is to post supplier quality scores on a supplier portal. The supplier’s quality record and rating should also be an important part of the quarterly or annual supplier review process. You may also have to use some of your own engineering resources to your suppliers improve their own processes to the point where they deliver reliable quality.
Automated Systems
Another key aspect of automating quality is a comprehensive solution for automating corrective and preventive actions, or CAPA system. An automated CAPA system that generates corrective actions reports, automatically routes them to the necessary review team, and tracks CAPA aging to be certain that actions and corrections are quickly made, is important to your company's quality endeavors.
Automating ECN tracking is another way of building quality into the process. By identifying items that require updates or removal from the process, the ECN system helps ensure that only safe products that meet your customer’s current specs make it to shipping.
Both an automated CAPA system and an automated ECN system are important parts of meeting government regulations and ensuring that processes are compliant. Automation not only helps streamline the process, but should also prevent deviations from standard processes and provide audit trails for signoffs and approvals. Built in automated track and trace or recall systems also help defray the costs of ensuring compliance with government regulations.
Focus on Consistent Quality to Build Your Reputation
The commitment to quality is the first step, but it’s equally important to ensure that systems and processes are in place to produce consistent quality. Superior quality results in lower costs because of less rework, scrap and returned goods. Lower costs result in higher profit margins.
Your company's reputation for quality helps attract new prospects and retain existing customers, resulting in more orders. In addition to receiving a larger share of your customer’s wallet, companies that enjoy a reputation for quality can often charge higher prices, so the revenue and profit impact can be even greater.
In Summary
A passion for quality can become a catalyst for process improvement that leads to lower costs. Whether you approach quality improvement using the lean concept of poka-yoke, or fool-proofing, or kaizen events focused on incremental improvements, the end-to-end process must have the reliable production of products with consistent quality as its goal.
Work on instilling quality as a core value throughout your company, while at the same time adding automated quality processes such as CAPA or ECN management. And as your company’s quality steadily improves, you should notice a corresponding increase in revenue and profitability.
