At ALTEX Wire and Cable, we know the saying “prevention is better than cure” to be true. Take health care for example. The CDC estimates that 75 percent of health care spending is for treating chronic diseases that could be prevented. Preventing diseases rather than waiting for them to occur seems like the obvious way to go.
The same can be said for quality control in manufacturing. Shigeo Shingo, considered to be the world’s leading expert on manufacturing practices, described detective methods of inspection as “post-mortem” assessments of quality defects at final inspection.
“This type of detective inspection simply issues a ‘post-mortem certificate,’” said Shingo in his book A Study of the Toyota Production System. “Improving inspection by increasing the number of detective inspections may increase the reliability of the inspection process but will have no effect whatsoever on the actual defect rate. The number of defects may go up or down but the sources of the defects remain unimpaired.”
In order to actually reduce the defect rate, you need preventive (or informative) inspections which feed information back to processing in real-time so that steps can be taken to correct the processing method and prevent a recurrence.
“The sooner a symptom (defect) is identified, the quicker and more effectively the problem can be treated and the greater the reduction in defects,” said Shingo. “Detective inspection discovers defects but informative inspections actually reduce them.”
Kevin Weiss, CEO of The Capability Group and Philip Crosby Associates points out that after-the-fact methods of quality control are inefficient manufacturing processes that lead to scrapped materials as well as time-consuming and expensive rework.
“When we inspect for quality, we hope to find any problems,” said Weiss. “When we prevent the problems from occurring, we cause quality to happen. The message is clear: if you build and sustain a prevention-oriented culture, both defects and nonconformances are driven out of the organization.”
At ALTEX, we use poka-yoke fixturing to proactively prevent defects from occurring. Often referred to as “mistake-proofing,” poka-yoke devices prevent errors by designing manufacturing processes, equipment and tools so that an operation literally cannot be performed incorrectly. iSixSigma refers to poka-yoke as “the first step in truly error-proofing a system.”
By using preventative quality control methods like poka-yoke fixturing, we ensure our manufacturing processes remain lean, cost-effective and produce high quality products the first time around by preventing mistakes at the source. Fixturing is just one of the ways we’re continuously improving our processes in order to get customers to market quickly and affordably.
Find out more about how poka-yoke fixturing can prevent the top manufacturing errors that cause defects in our recent solutions brief.
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