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MiMfg Magazine
March 2020
The Skill of Preventing Quality Problems
By Murray Sittsamer • The Luminous Group
There are many exciting trends leading to
improved manufacturing productivity and quality.
Still, some processes, equipment and jobs rely heavily
on human behavior and craftsmanship. Since people
are not perfect, and robots and software cannot
replace our workforce, mistakes will happen. This
does not mean that the risk of errors cannot be lowered.
In fact, you can eliminate or reduce the chance that
the most consequential problems will occur.
With the day-to-day pressures, companies of all
sizes sometimes have trouble taking the long view —
the 30,000 foot view — where being proactive counts.
And sometimes employees want to improve processes
and quality metrics, but they don’t know where or
how to begin.
Quality excellence starts
with risk assessment
Risk Assessment in manufacturing recognizes
that all problems are not equally risky. In fact, risk
can be assessed on three scales:
1. Severity of the resulting defect
2. Likelihood of occurrence of each
potential cause of a defect
3. Ability of the cause or defect to be
detected before impacting the next
station or the customer
After that risk ranking exercise, the items with
higher severities and higher expected occurrence
become the first things to improve.
What can be done to prevent a cause? It might
be a change to the process or tool, or an added
preventive maintenance task, or improved details
provided in standardized work instructions. If the
problem can’t be error-proofed, what about improving
the way the problem is detected? Could you replace
a casual visual check with a measurement gauge, or
even better, a 100 percent poke-yoke built into the
next station?
The above method is called Failure Mode and
Effects Analysis (FMEA). FMEA is best practiced
as a proactive quality improvement tool, and its
application prior to new product launches is required
in the Automotive industry.
It’s a different way of thinking
FMEA should be developed with the knowledge
of manufacturing engineers, operators, supervisors,
and sometimes with input from maintenance,
purchasing and other roles. It’s usually helpful to also
include someone that does not know much about
the process who is willing to ask pressing questions,
rather than assume that the process will always work as
intended. Once learned, FMEA could be facilitated
by someone in your company, or by an outside
facilitator with FMEA expertise. Many software
tools are available to organize the analysis and share
the learning with other product lines and programs.
Where to begin?
A good starting point to learn or improve existing
FMEAs would be an area that is driving high scrap,
rework or customer concerns. If your existing
manufacturing processes are down the learning curve,
consider putting a piece of equipment or new
process line under the microscope by applying
FMEA thinking. You might find that this approach
will help you prevent problems, and help employees
see what’s behind a quality issue.
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Murray Sittsamer is president of The Luminous
Group. He may be reached at 248.538.8677
or [email protected].