Manufacturing Needs Problem Solvers

Most manufacturers lose most of their profits due to quality problems.

The costs incurred from defects found on-site as well as defects found by the customer, consume far too great a share of a company’s profit. These costs are larger than one would consider at first glance. Defective parts have a unit cost associated (e.g. bill of materials value), but they cost a lot more. These parts have to be identified, segregated, reported, moved around a few times and eventually scrapped. Having missed a few items on the production order may also require additional production time to replace those defective units and likely overtime hours.

If the defective units escape and end up in the customer's facility, the costs will include a LOT of your management time and attention. Documented costs will include costs of replacement, priority courier fees, management travel to customer location, and more.

The customer will bare some costs that you may not see. It could be that your product (e.g. small electronic assembly) caused their product (e.g. consumer product) to fail and their costs could be much higher than what you see. You probably won’t have to absorb all those costs but you can be sure that the customer will start looking at your competitors more favourably. Or they might drop you altogether.

It would be great if we could prevent the failures from happening in the first place. We do try that with some tools but they aren’t completely effective. There are thousands of things that can go wrong but only a handful do. For the problems we don’t prevent, we need to understand, resolve and prevent them from recurring quickly after they first appear.

Problem solving is a skill that needs to be improved within manufacturing companies. Many of us know the basics but there are a lot of problems that require more than what basic tools can provide. You don’t need a degree in statistics (although that is valuable), but you do need to learn and understand a few more ideas and tools.

Belfield Academy has courses on Advanced Techniques for Industrial Problem Solving.

You won't find better lessons anywhere.