Traceability Provides Early Visibility into Quality

Driven by high-profile regulations compliance like the TREAD Act and RoHS, product quality has become a hot topic across industries worldwide. Spills and recalls are costly and time-consuming events that should be avoided entirely, but without adequate process traceability and product genealogy, too many customers will get defective products and too many products will be recalled for repair or replacement even though they are not defective. Both scenarios have enormous implications for the quality-conscious manufacturer that gets rated by its customers, and by the government, on customer satisfaction and safety. The core issue is early visibility into product quality.

Companies must contain potential quality problems before the product leaves the factory while providing detailed product genealogy information to trading partners. Today, few manufacturers enjoy a true component and process traceability system that enables this. If they do, the system likely does not extend outside to trading partners, contract manufacturing plants, distribution centers and transportation providers.

A traceability system that solves this problem will achieve two primary goals:

• Minimize the number of products that must be recalled when a manufacturing flaw is found, by identifying only the specific serial numbers that were built with the faulty component or by the faulty process.
• Eliminate recalls in the first place by providing real-time reports on the machines, components, stations, shifts and operators involved in the defective product and processes before the product is shipped.

The benefits of improved production quality, cost containment and product warranty management through part and process traceability - elements of a Digital Manufacturing¹ system - can ultimately improve customer satisfaction by reducing the risks and costs of poor quality and recalls.

Short-term benefits include:

• Operator error proofing ensures the correct part is handled by a qualified worker during assembly, minimizing re-work costs that would otherwise be incurred
• Automatic machine programming ensures that no miscommunication occurs between the process plan and how machines execute on that plan
• Early identification of defective parts in-process reduces the chance of performing non-value-added work in subsequent operations, saving the associated material and resource costs of those unnecessary steps
• Minimal quarantining of defective parts in inventory or work-in-process means reduced labor costs applied to this function, freeing up resources for value-added tasks
• Matching engineering change notices to defective lots or parts in-process saves product design/engineering re-work
• Catching defects through process monitoring before the product is further processed means lower production costs and further waste
• Catching defects through process monitoring before the product is shipped to customer means fewer costly recall events

Long-term benefits include:

• Identifying which specific parts/lots are defective by linking them to faulty processes means fewer products need to be recalled per recall event, saving the shipping and services costs, among other direct savings
• Fewer recalls and fewer products involved in each recall enhances customer perception of quality and minimizes negative quality perception/litigation

Conclusion

Soon product and component traceability will be mandated, both by customers and governments. However, manufacturers should be proactive with traceability initiatives since the costs of warranty management, product recall and poor quality are extremely high. Proper traceability initiatives require a link between the manufacturer's production planning and execution systems. A complete digital manufacturing for traceability system will minimize both the likelihood and cost of product recalls and save enormous time and money on defective products that are still in process.

Properly implemented, a digital manufacturing-for-traceability system enables manufacturers to better control the quality and performance of manufacturing processes in a mixed IT, mixed automation and multi-tier supplier manufacturing environment. It reduces the manufacturing cost of quality and warranty management while minimizing the negative impact recalls and poor quality have on the brand. The result is improved customer satisfaction and increased profits for the organization.

¹Digital manufacturing is a business strategy, enabled by technology, to manage all facets of creating, optimizing and executing manufacturing processes. For more on digital manufacturing visit www.ugs.com/tecnomatix.

August 2005 Main Page