How to Improve Manufacturing Quality With Lean Principles

Lean manufacturing principles have been widely adopted by businesses that want to minimize waste and boost efficiency while providing value to their customers. The same principles are also essential for businesses that want to improve process and product quality.

Right now, manufacturers face a variety of challenges — like rising demand, supply chain disruptions, and supply shortages. These challenges are likely to remain an issue well into the future.

With lean manufacturing principles, it’s possible to improve product quality, reduce waste, and more effectively navigate these challenges.

Measuring Manufacturing Quality Throughout Production With QATS

The lean manufacturing focus on reducing waste can also help improve product quality over time. The lean production method offers a set of tools and techniques for identifying waste, including forms of waste like manufacturing errors or product defects. With these techniques, a manufacturer can more effectively spot and eliminate sources of waste that are also compromising product quality.

For manufacturers wanting to improve quality, one of the most important techniques will be quality at the source, or QATS. With QATS, a business can empower employees with the tools and knowledge they need to detect defects, errors, or other process issues as they move through the production stream — rather than after a product is already complete and nearly ready to ship.

With QATS, quality becomes the responsibility of every worker in the production process. Individual employees become experts in their particular step of the process and actively look for errors, process mistakes, or defects that could result in a non-quality product.

By making quality the responsibility of employees and managers directly involved in the manufacturing process, the business can more easily identify errors and inefficiencies in the manufacturing process.

Rather than relying on post-mortems of finished products to determine where and how the production or sourcing process is reducing manufacturing quality, businesses can intervene as defects are identified and minimize finished products with quality errors.

This approach can often yield dramatic quality improvements in a short time after implementation. Once in place, it may help businesses reevaluate their production guidelines and processes without a more intensive audit or investigation that disrupts production.

Implementation of QATS can vary significantly depending on a business’s needs and resources.

One business may focus on training employees to identify and report issues that may compromise product quality, like low-quality raw materials or defective machines. Another business may leverage tools like IoT devices to gather data on the flow of materials and other key process information.

Businesses with large sites or facilities may even take advantage of technology like inspection drones that can conduct safety inspections and monitor the site while production is ongoing.

Minimizing Waste by Minimizing Errors

While information from the production process is important, it doesn’t always tell the full story about the overall process or the origin of manufacturing defects.

Value stream mapping (VSM allows management to develop a better idea of what the manufacturing process looks like and where errors may originate. This lean tool is a flowchart that documents every step of the manufacturing process. The American Society for Quality (ASQ) considers it an “essential lean tool for an organization” and creating manufacturing processes that ensure product quality.

By laying out the flow of material and information through the manufacturing process, managers can develop a better understanding of where waste exists and how processes may be improved. Implementation of facility or process upgrades is also easier with a roadmap of the current production process.

The same process can allow a manufacturer to reduce waste and reduce product error at the same time, both improving quality and driving down the overall cost of manufacturing.

In addition to providing value to managers overseeing production, VSM is also an important technique for businesses with employees dedicated to quality improvement. If a manufacturer uses quality circles or quality improvement teams to identify sources of waste, information from floor employees and VSM diagrams will be essential tools.

Product Focus, Customer Focus, and Continuous Improvement

As another essential lean principle, defining value will help manufacturers redirect existing resources to better meet customer needs and improve product quality.

By creating a customer-focused environment, management can redirect resources and reinvent processes to more effectively meet customer needs.

For some businesses, this approach can help minimize waste. By eliminating unnecessary features or products, it’s possible to reinvest existing resources into products that are most likely to be purchased.

Ensuring that products can be both manufactured and sold quickly may minimize waste of raw materials and manufacturing resources like shipping capacity or warehouse storage space.

Focusing on customer needs can also help a business more effectively identify errors and other issues that could generate process waste.

Using Lean Principles to Boost Manufacturing Quality

As manufacturers face mounting process challenges, product quality is as important as ever. Lean principles, essential for businesses wanting to reduce waste and more efficiently manage resources, is also a powerful tool for guaranteeing quality products.

By using lean techniques like value stream mapping or principles like quality at the source, businesses can more effectively visualize manufacturing processes and identify process factors that limit product quality.