What to include when creating your product quality inspection checklist

High on the list of priorities for every manufacturer is ensuring they create a consistent output of products that exceeds the expectations of their customers. By doing so, they increase consumer satisfaction and safety while reducing the threat of product recalls and complaints.

In your bid to maintain high quality, you need a robust approach to product inspection. This means undertaking comprehensive checks across the manufacturing process to ensure that there are no issues.

Having a quality inspection checklist is an important tool when carrying out checks on your product. It should list all the bases you need to cover to guarantee the best possible quality from your output and enable you to replicate the same level of inspection every time.

There are many things to consider in your inspection process, and you need to embed them all into your checklist. Your checklist should also be tailored to the needs of your plant and the products it processes.

Below, we have outlined the areas you need to contemplate when planning your product quality inspection approach to help you decide what to include in the checklist.

• Product requirements
• Packaging requirements
• Material checks
• Contamination
• Uniformity
• Defects

Product requirements

You will have agreed on the requirements for your products for your customer. Examples could include a set weight, dimension or mixture of ingredients within each item (if you are working with food). Therefore, part of your inspection process must involve investigations that make sure you are complying with the parameters agreed with your customer.

One of the best tools to use at this point is a checkweigher. Using checkweighing, you review the weight of your product against set limits. You utilise it in pre-production to check the different components in your product, enabling you to use only the right amount of ingredients. It also enables you to check the weight of your final product – including packs or boxes of your product, so ensuring you reach the right combined weight for shipping.

Incorporating your product requirements into your checklist ensures that you prevent clients from refusing orders for not meeting the agreed specification or receiving complaints about poor quality.

Packaging requirements

On top of your agreed product specifications, there will be packaging requirements that you need to consider. Many products, and in particular food products, will have labelling that contains nutritional or other information. This includes weight, ingredients, calorie information and allergens.

In the food industry, there are standards regarding labelling. Under these standards, labels must accurately represent the products inside the packaging so that consumers are fully informed about what they are eating. In the case of allergens or dietary requirements, this is essential to keep customers safe and prevent your business from getting caught in a crisis.

Even outside of food, customers will want to understand what they are purchasing and will expect the label to represent the product adequately.

Bearing in mind the importance of truthful labelling, your inspection checklist needs to help you meet the specifications shown on product packaging. This means checking that your output is the correct weight and containing only the agreed ingredients. Again, a checkweigher helps you designate the weights of your products before and after production. You might also need additional equipment to help you ensure there are no contaminants (such as allergens) in your product that are not represented on the packaging.

Material checks

Next, you need to account for the substances or materials you will be using to create your output. This will usually take place at the pre-production stage of the manufacturing process.

When undertaking material checks, the aim is to ensure that you are starting from a high-quality point. If the substances you are using are subpar, it could increase the chances of ending up with a below-standard product. It could also disrupt your production line if the substances do not perform in the way they are supposed to.

List all the features you expect to see from the starting materials you are using and perform checks to make sure they meet expectations. In the case of food, this means checking that it hasn’t been kept beyond its best or become damaged in its journey to your plant. If there is any issue, you may need to find alternative materials or communicate with your supplier to prevent it from happening again.

By adding these checks, you safeguard that your production is starting on a firm footing and make it easier to create a perfect final product.

Contamination

One of the main reasons that inspection is so vital in manufacturing is that it addresses contamination. Contamination brings potentially harmful consequences by compromising consumer safety or reducing quality. This, in turn, sees manufacturers facing breaches in compliance, unhappy customers, lost sales and cost implications.

Addressing contamination in your plant means having diligent inspection practices in place. This means finding a solution that suits your needs. Start by reflecting on all the potential contaminants your product could come into contact with before reaching your factory and during production. Then, seek to find tools that enable you to identify all relevant contaminants.

There are many systems available to help you with inspection. We’ve already touched upon checkweighing, which identifies irregularities if your product falls under or over set weight limits. However, this is only helpful if you are dealing with contaminants that are dense and affect weight.

For more rigorous inspection, you may consider metal detection and x-ray. As the name suggests, metal detection enables you to find traces of metal in your products. It is worth noting that it cannot detect all metals, such as stainless steel.

Finally, the most comprehensive form of inspection on the market is x-ray. X-ray identifies a wide range of contaminations, including metal. Even so, it cannot detect low-density items like paper or insects, so it’s essential only to use it as part of your inspection process and not a catch-all.

By understanding the solutions available to you and the contaminants you need to account for, you are able to craft an inspection process that works for you. Once you have done so, include it in your checklist so your staff know what investigations to carry out to remove any contaminants that may impact your output. This will prevent you from threatening the health of customers and reduce the risk of product recalls.

Uniformity

Another critical factor in your inspection may be making sure all your products within a line are uniform. There are many reasons for uniformity: it ensures each item matches the labelling specifications and creates a consistent experience for consumers, helping to keep them satisfied.

Using an inspection system, such as a checkweigher, you ensure that each product fits within your tolerances and does not drastically differ from others on the line.

If an item is non-uniform, it could mean there has been an issue, such as a contaminant falling into a product or a batch not being processed correctly. Further checks should help you find the cause and address it.

Defects

The final part of your checklist should focus on logging any defects you have found during your investigations. Defects could include contamination found, under or overweight products, issues with the starting materials or any other irregularity.

Once you’ve identified a possible defect, it’s essential to flag it so that you find the cause of the problem. In some cases, it could be a problem with your supplier, production line machinery or user error. By finding the fault, you able to address it and put in place an adequate fix that will prevent it from reoccurring later.

This will enable you to create a culture of quality assurance alongside your quality control procedures through inspection.

Conclusion

A product quality inspection checklist acts as an important reminder of the various steps you need to take when ensuring your output is as high quality as possible. However, to cover all the potential issues, you need to make sure that your checklist considers all the factors that may compromise your products.

Alongside your checklist, you need to have the right equipment to enable you to carry out all the necessary protocols. This will allow you to address any faults that may arise during your checks and consistently meet standards.

If you need help in setting up your inspection process in your plant, we are here to assist. We provide a range of inspection systems, including checkweighers, metal detectors and x-rays, to suit the varying needs of your production lines.