7 Strategies to Reduce Manufacturing Defects for Good

Manufacturing defects are the scourge of the industry.

Apart from being time-consuming and damaging to your reputation, manufacturing defects are plain expensive due to the wasted materials, rework, extended employee/machine hours, and brand damage. Each one of these factors leads companies to have a poor ROI (return on investment) that could extend beyond the manufacturing defect event.

Thankfully, there are several strategies and tools that enable modern manufacturers to leverage intelligent standardization methods and stop manufacturing defects before they happen.

The Impact of Manufacturing Defects

Manufacturing defects can have an incredibly negative impact on a company.

First, manufacturing defects hurt your bottom line. Even paint defects can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on the rework that is needed and how much of the process needs to be redone. Defects can also strain supply chain relations if not caught early and well documented, adding even greater financial worry for businesses.

At the same time, frequent manufacturing defects can affect company morale and culture. If employees feel that leadership isn’t working to mitigate defects, they are likely to adopt process dissonance and unproductive dispositions.

As if the internal costs weren’t bad enough, manufacturing defects hurt your company’s brand and reputation. In light of recent events in the aviation industry, Boeing is still dealing with the aftermath of their missing bolts issue, a manufacturing defect that could have been avoided.

However, while manufacturing defects can be an uncomfortable topic, it is now a more necessary discussion than ever before. Luckily the industry has several tools, strategies, and methodologies to help companies keep their manufacturing defects to a minimum.

7 Strategies and Tools to Eliminate Manufacturing Defects

1. Understand that Manufacturing Defects are Everyone’s Responsibility

First and foremost, when it comes to quality output and defect mitigation, everyone is responsible. From the operator on the shop floor to the sales associate, quality is a company-wide pursuit. This is a crucial factor to understand for a few key reasons:

• Aligned objectives unite the workforce: The daily activities of each person should align with the company's goal to reduce manufacturing defects. This unity empowers workers to catch issues early and be proactive when finding new ways to improve quality.
• Employee-wide engagement fosters better collaboration: Employees who feel engaged are more likely to take pride in their work, make improvement suggestions, and participate in key manufacturing defects objectives.
• Customers buy more than just a product: When customers buy a product, they are dealing with each department of the company. From design, production, sales, marketing, and leadership, quality and manufacturing defects are experienced by the customer firsthand.
• Quality control is more effective when implemented in all stages of production: Instead of saving quality checks for only a dedicated quality department, integrating quality practices into every task ensures that the right actions are being achieved at all times. Quality departments are necessary, but quality actions should not be placed in one proverbial basket.

As we outlined earlier, defects can have detrimental effects on the whole business. For this reason, it is paramount that all employees and teams are involved in this endeavor, including engineers, operators, management,… and everyone else.

2. Standardize the Process with Intelligent Software

While the corporate responsibility of defect mitigation is paramount to implementing a viable quality strategy, standardization is a close second. Standardization as a defect mitigation technique cannot be understated. And it’s not the last time you’ll hear about it in this article.

Standardization is key to mitigating unwanted defects because it enables the workforce to have two vital qualities.

• Consistency
• Compliance

Tools like work instruction software and digital SOPs enable companies to be consistent and achieve widespread compliance by using the following capabilities.

• Step-by-step procedures: Digital work instructions provide clear procedures for every step of the process, ensuring that workers know what to do and when to do it.
• Reduced Complexity: The less complicated a process, the fewer manufacturing defects can occur.
• Visual guidelines: While text can be interpreted in any number of ways, digital SOPs take full advantage of images and videos to give workers a full understanding of each procedure.
• Deviations become apparent: When a process is standardized, it’s easier to see where defects and deviations have occurred.
• Culture of compliance: Instead of each worker choosing their preferred method, leading to a wide variety of variations and defects, a good standardization strategy will help workers comply with the best methods.

While standardization should imply that workers are using the best processes at all times, it is important to note that best practices should evolve as you find new and better ways to hone and error-proof each procedure. For this reason, companies need to rely on tools and systems like work instruction software that allow them to quickly make changes and update their procedures.

3. Leverage Connected Worker Technology

Let’s take standardization a step further with connected worker technology, which is proving to be an ultimate error-proofing tool for the industry.

Connected worker technology is about augmenting the abilities of your employees and their systems by enhancing worker-machine communication. Instead of simply guiding workers through a specified task, this technology monitors and interacts with workers to mitigate defects and increase quality-driven workflows.

• Real-time monitoring and traceability: By connecting workers to their environment, organizations can better monitor and trace quality actions, pinpointing when and where errors occur.
• Quality validations: While operators are performing their tasks, connected worker technology and tools are constantly validating every action. If anything is outside of specification, the system will alert the operator and direct them to the next appropriate steps.
• Automated values and actions: When workers manually adjust settings on tools and machines, there is a high chance of error. Instead, enable your systems and tools to communicate and automatically apply the required parameters.

A perfect example of how connected worker technology can eliminate manufacturing defects is integrated IoT torque tools. As the standardized work instructions guide employees through the assembly process, the system is also communicating with connected tools to automatically apply the correct amount of torque, monitor and validate every fastener, gather production data in real time, and lock the tool when not needed.

This process provides organizations with an unprecedented level of error-proofing when using connected tools.

4. Use Digital Inspections & Quality Checklists

Inspections and quality checklists are a key part of ensuring manufacturing defects never come into or leave the facility. The problem is that inspections take time and often require a dedicated team. On top of that, even quality inspectors can make mistakes and forget to check key components.

However, inspection processes can also be standardized with the use of intelligent software. Digital checklists and step-by-step guides ensure that all quality inspectors are familiar with the required process and can check all components correctly.

At the same time, companies can create in-process inspection checklists for operators to perform as they are assembling the product. This helps to share the load and create a faster and more streamlined quality control process.

Another problem often arises with inspection procedures: lost data.

Let’s say your inspector has his clipboard and is following the proper inspection procedure. But where does the checklist go when he’s finished? In a cabinet, on a desk, in a binder?

Even with the best filing systems, this vital inspection data is not readily available and your business is more susceptible to letting manufacturing defects go out to customers

Instead, all inspection data should be gathered and stored within one centralized digital location. This enables organizations to quickly pull up production and inspection data within an instant and share them with their customers.

Republic Manufacturing uses their work instruction software to share quality assurance data with their customers within a simple and easy-to-understand format.

5. Training Should Reflect the Real Manufacturing Environment

Training can make all the difference when it comes to manufacturing defects. Employees who don’t receive the proper training will inevitably cause errors down the line. And worse, they could even train others to make the same ongoing mistakes.

The issue is that employees are not prepared for the real world because their training curriculum is only slightly similar to the real tasks and challenges they’ll experience when working on the shop floor.

But we can get around this issue by utilizing your already established standardization software as a key part of your training strategy. Since your chosen standardization system is foundational on the shop floor, it makes sense for it to be an integral part of the training process. This strategy creates a clear and consistent methodology that allows new hires to learn new skills that directly apply to the real world, reducing the risk of defects due to human error.

By using systems like work instruction software as an integral training platform, companies can implement various training methods to suit their specific needs.

• Interactive e-learning: Within a controlled setting, new hires can work through an interactive training process that outlines the key methodologies and best practices of the company.
• Real-time learning: Employees can begin creating value sooner by following super detailed training instructions that are geared toward new hires. This provides the new employee with greater levels of guidance resulting in them learning new skills faster while leaving little room for error.
• Track employee certifications: Track the qualifications of each employee and ensure that only qualified personnel perform specific jobs.

Chesterton, a world-class provider of sealing and liquid pump solutions, leverages their work instruction software to create an advanced training curriculum that combines interactive e-learning in the classroom and real-time learning on the job. As a result, they were able to effectively reduce their training times while reducing customer complaints and manufacturing defects.

6. Implement a Comprehensive QMS

Adopting a comprehensive QMS (Quality Management System) strategy is an excellent way to track, maintain, and improve your manufacturing defect mitigation practices over time.

Common QMS examples are ISO 9001, TQM (Total Quality Management), and Six Sigma. Each of these systems provides a specific structure and allows companies to incorporate all of the above strategies within a highly regulated framework.

Users of these systems will need to keep in-depth documentation to track their progress over time and gauge what they’ve done and how effective their strategies have been. To accomplish this goal, it makes sense again to leverage your standardization method.

If using work instruction software, each procedure is well-documented and process authors have access to a complete version history of all work instructions. This capability enables companies to track defect rates and then compare them with the improvements they’ve made over time, providing leadership with actionable insights.

7. Prioritize Communication

And finally, communication between all employees is key to reducing defects and making meaningful improvements.

For instance, while engineers are crucial to the design and function of any product, assembly operators on the shop floor are the ones building the product day in and day out.

• Engineers will see how the product should be assembled according to specifications.
• Operators will see the real-life application of the process and can provide ideas to make the process more efficient.

Each group brings a valuable perspective that increases the overall quality of the product and helps companies maintain the best process available. While engineers and operators are the most obvious examples, there are a dozen cases to be made for every other inter-departmental relationship with a company.

Unsurprisingly, there are systems, tools, and strategies that facilitate this level of communication between departments.

• Gemba Walk: Going to the shop floor to observe and communicate with your workers within the real-world manufacturing environment can be an invaluable experience. Talk to people on the shop floor and get their perspective. They are a wealth of underused knowledge and insight.
• Alerts and notifications: Catch manufacturing defects before they happen with programmed alerts and notifications that inform users of new processes and/or potential issues.

KONE, a world-leading manufacturer of elevators and escalators, uses a unique Andon procedure that is built directly into their digital work instructions. This level of communication empowers them to be responsive in the face of manufacturing defects or opportunities for improvement.

Another key strategy that companies can use to increase communication and thereby mitigate defects is to implement a DMS (Daily Management System). The objective of any DMS is to increase value for the customer through periodic continuous improvement efforts that involve the whole company. These systems provide all team members with daily KPIs pertaining to company goals and actionable insights in greater detail.

This level of communication and defect mitigation is only possible if you have the strategy and tools in place to easily gather comprehensive data and inform teams of their successes and failures.