Your products’ quality and your organization’s reputation are reliant on checks established throughout your production process and even across your supply chain. Identifying the places where quality checks can have the greatest impact across your factory, you can establish a blue print for where you can begin enacting powerful change across your plant. Establish some of the following top 5 checks for quality management and you’ll begin to ignite continuous improvement across your specific location as well as throughout your organization.
Checks at the Supply Level
Without a concise understanding of the types of goods you’re comprising your products of and the quality of those various pieces and parts, it can be difficult to comprehend the quality of your goods before issues, quality defects, and flaws become larger problems. By establishing checks at the supply level, you can understand which quality defects need to be addressed before the quality issue results in costly recalls and non-compliance.
Process Checks
One of the most important parts of establishing consistent processes and, therefore reducing product variation is developing a system of checks or quality requirements. Identify repeatable processes and then fine-tune that production process to highlight where adjustments should be made to create a more consistent product. In addition to developing a more consistent product, fine tuning your process can boost efficiencies and help minimize human error.
Cleaning Checks
While establishing checks throughout your process to reduce variation and human error is vital to improving product quality across your plant, developing checks around cleanliness is equally important to putting out a quality product that is safe for consumers and differentiates your company from the pack.
Look at your processes and identify where cleanliness is vital to your product, including quality sanitary inline strainers from SaniClean Strainers. Setting up cleanliness checks at strategic points within your processes that are more critical, you’ll improve your quality where it matters in a more efficient way. Additionally, searching for the most important checkpoints can help your organization prioritize the most important changes first and continue to improve over time. Perform a physical or visual inspection on machinery so that you can better reveal how often cleaning needs to be completed in order to put out a better product that meets compliance standards.
Perform People Checks
No matter how talented your quality team is, people make mistakes. We get tired. We get distracted. Although automating checks, quality inspection alarms and processes can help decrease human error, establishing quality checks specifically for your team is an easy win when it comes to boosting your quality control efforts and efficiency.
Check Your Facilities and Storage
No matter what industry you’re in, your facilities can become an imperative part of your product output and your product quality. Establish quality checks or quality requirements within your plant in regards to the environment. What should ideal temperatures and humidity be? What kind of environment is ideal for you to develop the best product possible? Understanding the environment surrounding your goods and supplies as well as your finished product is dependent on adequate quality checks that help create a consistent environment.
Seeing immediate results from your efforts toward continuous improvement doesn’t require a complete overhaul. Instead, developing a plan for various quality checks can help you and your team make immediate adjustments and see results quickly.