A simple statement will surely affect the way you see your business improve, and here it is: as the quality of your production rises, your costs get lower. This is based off of an even simpler concept – making sure production runs the way it’s meant to will lower the costs that any stops or defects may cause.

What does it take to actually improve the production quality?

As manufacturing becomes more competitive and globalized, production quality and cost are perhaps more important than ever. Simply stated, consumers have more choices and more information about your product and its alternatives than ever before. Simultaneously, quality failures in the field are now more visible than ever due to reviews on sites like Yelp, Amazon, etc.

We want to help you in achieving your goals and enabling all of our clients to grow their manufacturing business, so we decided to write up some cool advice for you.

Establish “Quality” as Your Company’s Main Value

As with anything in life and any industry you venture into – your North Star needs to be a value you will uphold and defend until your last stand. This means it needs to be something your organization and all of its members will hold above all else because it essentially has to be a defining feature of your company and, inherently, your products.

Approach this challenge from multiple sides of the production / business processes, since you need to be thinking about the people within your organization, but also the ones you’re serving – the final customers.

Get in the headspace of an (ideal) customer whose purchase, support and word of mouth pushes your company further ahead. Apply that perspective to the way you organize, plan and implement your production processes so as to have everything running smoothly as opposed to having waste come up and clog your entire process.

Get Petty About Your Costs

As you start getting serious about improving the production quality within your company, you have to get down to the last detail when it comes to the costs of achieving the high level of quality you’re truly striving for.

The cost-of-quality (CoQ) is made up of two parts: the cost-of-conformance (CoC) and the cost-of-poor-quality (CoPQ). These components themselves also break down into several types of costs.

The cost-of-conformance is the total cost of maintaining acceptable quality levels, while the cost-of-poor-quality, or CoPQ, is an indicator used by manufacturers to measure the total cost of failing to maintain acceptable quality levels. It is the sum of all expenses incurred in producing a product that does not reach the organization’s quality standards.

What do we mean by “get petty”? Well, in its simplest form, these costs need to be taken very seriously and actively worked on in organized intervals in order to achieve the goal you’ve set out for your organization.

• Set up and organize the means to track and monitor costs
• Hold all your performance stats to a benchmark to measure against on set intervals
• Apply corrective actions on a regular basis (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, etc.)

All of the data you’re gathering through software like Tipteh IoT platform is meant to serve you, so make sure you’re analyzing it on a regular basis and applying the right corrective action to get your company back on track!

Make Use of The Latest Software Solutions

Get things to run more smoothly and get higher quality of production with more precise, better designed and more effective software solutions for your production line. By analyzing the data that manufacturing processes generate, you can find new ways to remain competitive.

While a solution like the Tipteh IoT platform is included in this section, we do firmly believe that it is justifiably so, since the increase in quality has to start from a point of informed decision-making. Monitoring things like your machinery’s OEE is what’s going to give you the information you need to be able to upgrade your production quality.

By tracking your OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness), you will be able to identify areas where process improvements are needed.

When you have been keeping track of downtime and quality losses for a couple of months, you can easily open the Tipteh IoT platform report to see a Pareto chart showing which reasons are contributing most to downtime. Then it is a matter of organizing a team or project to work on reducing those reasons.

Handle Quality Losses As You Go

At its core, we can classify quality losses as a hindrance to your overall line productivity and, in doing so, we recognize three different ways it may affect it:

• Investigation and repair of quality issues can require a lot of downtime
• Production tends to slow when working with materials of varying quality
• Not being able to land the correct fit for your production process to maintain quality

Through the use of a software solution like Tipteh IoT platform, as time goes by, you will notice that there are certain reasons for scrap and rework. This can help you track and analyze the data so that you can easily see which reasons are most common.

Make sure your team focuses on improving processes and identifying the deeper causes to eliminate these reasons for losses.