6 Common Quality Issues in the Manufacturing Industry

Business leaders worldwide, especially in the manufacturing sector, are facing a major predicament – dealing with supply chain disruptions and inefficiencies. This is having a direct impact on several areas of business operations, impacting everything from financials, production management, inventory planning, customer planning and even capital expenditure. In addition to all of this, it is having a serious impact on quality management efforts, because supplier quality plays a key role in delivering overall quality performance.

In this blog, we highlight six common quality issues in the manufacturing sector and suggest why a next-generation platform to streamline quality management workflows is the need of the hour.

Issue #1 – Lack of Standardized SOPs – To truly deliver quality performance and meet quality objectives, businesses must have clearly defined Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) with a quality-first approach across the following areas of operations – manufacturing and production, supply chain management, equipment management, training, raw material consumption, and shop floor processes. When SOPs are not clearly defined, it creates chaos as workers have to deal with grey areas and ambiguity, and this results in unpredictable output.

How Automation Helps: By using a next-generation solution like CQ EQMS, the quality workflow across the manufacturing lifecycle becomes standardized. Of course, you need a platform that is flexible and customizable to suit your needs, but once it’s set up, the workflows must be automated. The process of spotting a quality issue, feeding this into a CAPA and RCA process and then implementing next steps must be collaborative, data-driven and streamlined.

Issue #2 – Siloed Approach to Quality Assurance — Siloed departments create barriers and cannot offer consolidated quality control data. This is due to the use of legacy systems that lack the ability to synchronize people, processes and systems. Due to the absence of an integrated workflow among departments, businesses are left with multiple quality metrics and processes with conflicting goals.

How Automation Helps: Therefore, the need of the house is an EQMS that unifies all quality data (single source of truth) in one place. It must also seamlessly integrate with your ERP, CRM, PLM and other business systems – so all quality analytics are done with real-time data.

Issue #3 – Inefficient Supplier Quality Management — Manufacturers must pay careful attention to supplier quality – both from a compliance and quality standpoint. Without proper insight into supplier performance, manufacturers can incur high non-compliance costs and cannot ensure the quality of the end-product. As a result, supply chain leaders need deeper levels of visibility into the quality metrics and ongoing performance of supplier, especially the Tier-1 and Tier-2 suppliers.

How Automation Helps: The only way to ensure supplier quality performance is to have an automated process for supplier onboarding, ongoing supplier management efforts and continuous improvement. In this e-book, we do a deep dive into what it takes to ensure all supplier quality management efforts are completely digitalized and automated.
Download it here : https://www.compliancequest.com/whitepaper/next-gen-supplier-management/

Issue #4 – Improper Equipment Management — Equipment-heavy industries need to ensure Return on Invested Capital (ROIC) remains high to produce quality products that meet regulatory standards, customer expectations, and internal specifications. However, any inadequacies in equipment management processes such as calibration or maintenance activities directly impact output, increasing time-to-market, product defects, and production costs.

How Automation Helps: With the CQ Equipment Management Solution, you can simplify your equipment management right from tracking, scheduling, maintaining calibration, performing regular maintenance activities, to reporting. It also enables users to have an on-demand 360-degree view of their equipment, including adherence to regulatory requirements and international standards such as ISO 9001 and ISO 10012.

ComplianceQuest’s Equipment Management Software facilitates getting the best performance out of your equipment and instruments, resulting in an improved production process and faster time-to-market, while reducing the cost of production.

Issue #5 – High Cost of Quality (CoQ) — Cost of Quality defines and measures a company’s resources used for prevention activities and maintaining product quality instead of the costs resulting from internal and external failures. Ideally, Cost of Good Quality (COGQ) ensures the company is focused on product quality and outcome. However, when the Cost of Poor Quality (COPQ) increases due to nonconformance, it affects the overall CoQ of the organization. This is because a high Cost of Quality is associated with poor quality, scrap cost, or customer complaints.

How Automation Helps: With CQ Nonconformance Management Solution, you can capture, triage, investigate and disposition all nonconformances in a timely and effective manner. It plays a key role in directly reducing CoQ, while improving overall quality management and compliance efforts.

Issue #6 – Manual Training — Apart from being a compliance requirement, training allows employees to know the “right way” to perform a specific task. This is crucial to improving knowledge acquisition. However, organizations that use paper-based training do not have visibility to trained employees, access to updated resources, or facility to handle mass training sessions. As a result of poor-quality training, manufacturing companies can witness a decline in product quality, increases in manufacturing cost, and raw material wastage as there is no process consistency. It also affects employee competency and job readiness.

How Automation Helps: A key part of quality, compliance and safety management, CQ Training Management allows you to train employees in a timely fashion, and keep your workforce skilled with constantly evolving changes in the environment. Integrating training into your EQMS supports a stable, reliable and repeatable training management process, ensuring that your entire organization has the knowledge it needs, from GxP guidelines to international standards to government regulations.

ComplianceQuest EQMS for the Manufacturing Industry

The Enterprise Quality Management System (EQMS) from ComplianceQuest, built on the Salesforce.com platform — is designed to resolve key quality-related issues in the manufacturing sector. ComplianceQuest’s next-generation EQMS platform offers CAPA software with 8D available out-of-the-box. It makes it easy to automate, streamline and digitalize the entire 8D process. The cloud-based system also addresses the regulatory needs of the manufacturing industry, including ISO 14001, ISO 9001, ISO 31000, OSHAS 18001/ISO 45001, and GHGRP (greenhouse gas reporting program).

To know more about CQ’s EQMS solution, request a demo: visit: https://www.compliancequest.com/online-demo/.