Multiplying the power of your Quality Systems

If you missed our webinar on how ro Muliply the power of yoru quality system with the amazing Tamela Serensits from Argolytics then you are in luck, we recorded it!

The whole point of the webinar was to talk about how to drive business improvement and reduce costs by multiplying the power of your Quality systems. We wanted you to see how easy TRENDABLE™ makes it to capture and understand your Statistical Process Control (SPC) information at the operator level and that's important, if you can make it easy to collect the data in a controlled way then you get good data. Good data means good decisions.

Then we talked about how to leverage TRENDABLE's integration with Mango® QHSE to manage your Quality Assurance elements letting you capture and understand the impacts of those defects within your improvements and non-conformance system, how to use good Management of Change processes to update your systems and reissue your controlled documentation. 

Plus, we also wanted to help you gain some critical business insights that would help you reduce production waste, breeze through your next audits and win new business. We'll show you what's possible in this short webinar:

1. How to stay within customer specifications
2. Engage your whole team in quality control
3. What to do when something goes wrong
4. How easy it is to take action based on real data
5. How to easily manage your controlled documents

Understanding your limits

In the webinar, you'll hear Tamela talk about how to really understand what your data is telling you. It may look like you are out of control and need to step in but in reality, when you are armed with the right level of data what you may be seeing in the natural variation of your process and the best thing you can do is leave it alone! However, just watching a run chart and where it's popping out of spec isn't really enough to understand your process, without looking at your process histogram and the distribution of your data you don't really know how your process is going. 

Importantly, as Tamela points out, once you add your control limits to that histogram you are really going to understand what's going on. Your control limits are set at 3 standard deviations above and below your mean, that lets you see how many observations will fall outside your controls with your current process. In other words, you understand that those outliers you see on your run chart are expected, so if you expect them, then don't panic about them.

Once you know your process, then and only then can you start going about trying to tune it up. So where do you start first? Simple, you need to reduce the variation within your process, find out what drives those out of limits or results at the far end of your limits and pull that in. Once you have your variation reduced then you can start to work out how you move your mean, the average of all the readings, you are getting closer to the target for the centre of the process that you are running.

Now you can do this all on paper if you want, but the challenge is there isn't anything forcing the discipline or linking up the data, that's one of the many benefits of TRENDABLE™ it's not going to let you plot a point on your chart that's out of control without telling the system what happened and what you did, that's codifying in good practices (and good data). 

Integrate with your QA system

One of the key things when you are working through your continuous improvement loop is to keep track of it. Raise your improvement records or non conformances real time, when all the information is fresh and available. That's why we love the ability to launch your non conformance record in Mango® right from within TRENDABLE™ . When you think about it from the user point of view, they don't have to go find another bit of paper, there is no time away from the process, they can just click a button on their SPC system and there they are, exactly where they need to enter the data. That means that your team are going to add the data you need to have long term to drive improvements.

Understand the Cost of Quality

It can be hard to capture and understand the real cost of quality of an issue but it's important, it should drive a lot of decisions about what you do, importantly however it's shouldn't be just a snapshot of one instance.

Cost of Quality is the total cost you need to invest to fix and issue, it's the material you are scrapping, the machine time, the labour time, engineering time, investigation time and much more. It all wraps up to give you a real $$ number for that event. You may not have scrapped material but if it took engineering an hour to review and feedback, then 30 mins of quality manager time to review, that's still a cost to you.

Looking at it as a one time event is important to understand that one data point, but as Tamera pointed out in her talk around SPC, looking at one data point can drive a wrong decision, it's the same with cost of quality, you need to be able to easily pull out a report on the product that shows all the non conformances over time and the costs, that way you see the real cost of quality for this product or process and so can make decisions based on real data, that's where Mango's simple reporting tools come into play either through its easy to build reports or charts.

Some of the other tools you need to really understand your process are also to be found in TRENDABLE™ for Data Analysis which is going to give you all your process capability charting and analysis, so you can really understand what's going on using all the data you have collected in your SPC system

Close the Loop

So now you understand your data, you have history, you have capability charts, what do you do with it? You take some action!

Maybe you need to raise a maintenance request to have a part of your process maintained, or you need to update the documentation to add new process parameters or information. Being able to do all of these things and more directly inside your QA system means you have one single source of truth, and you can demonstrate to your team and auditors all the steps you have taken to solve this issue, because they are all linked and fully documented. That's where Mango's ability to raise and process the change request and link it directly to the improvement record makes life simple and allows you to reference all the documentation you need to change, the skills you need to update and the costs of doing it as well.

Once you have that change approved, then you need to update your documentation, that's quick because you can just update the documentation you have in Mango® which is automatically linked to the instruction set you have referenced in TRENDABLE. The minute you publish your document, it's available real time to everyone. That means no more running around having to gather the old hard copy paperwork and hoping you got every copy. What's more, you can automatically notify everyone that the documentation is now available and what you did, and get the team leader to confirm they have told their team. All of which is tracked back to their HR training records. The entire documentation update, communication and awareness loop for your ISO compliance ticked off, but more importantly, it's simple to do and simple for the users and ensures everyone is on the right version.

Keep it Simple

When things are complicated, things get missed. When you have a complicated system to control a complex process it's always going to be out of control because when people find it just to hard to get things changed or reported or action taken, they invariably decide to just not try. Giving your team the power to really understand what is going on in their process and to instantly be able to raise issues and know that people are being notified about them and to know where the right paperwork is at any time is invaluable and quality simplifies things which we all know means you quickly improve your processes, improve your employee engagement and ultimately improves your profit line.

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