Automation and quality control

No matter if your business produces 1,000 or 10,000 products a day, the risk attributed to poor quality management remains the same. Having appropriate protocols in place to consistently deliver reliable goods is essential to not just maintaining customer loyalty but to sustaining business costs and profits. After all, few things can impact revenue as much as product quality.

As a business owner or manager, you can invest in the best equipment and support it with talented staff, but if you cannot limit bad parts, you risk increasing material, labor and disposal costs, jeopardizing order deadlines and damaging customer satisfaction and retention rates.

All that has heavy effects on reputation and the bottom line. So how does a business ensure that at every stage of the manufacturing process goods are monitored efficiently for defects without disrupting the line? The answer is quality control.

Quality control is a procedure or set of procedures that a company uses to see that all end products meet predefined standards and requirements. This allows businesses to identify product variation and in return rectify production line failures. While no one can guarantee total elimination of errors, if a supplier easily can capture input and process flow data of individual parts, that can go a long way toward capturing deficient parts before they are shipped.

Aligning the production process with industry standards comes with headaches for medium-to-high-volume production parts suppliers. Maintaining quality control of an individual part by keeping up with a line’s history of processes can be very labor-intensive and slow. This holds especially true when multiple machines — sometimes at multiple stations — perform the same process. If one machine begins producing nonconforming parts and they flow down the line with good parts, the quality-suspect range of nonconformist parts increases exponentially. Or if raw material is determined to be in nonconformance, then which in-process parts and finished goods now are impacted?