The worth and effectiveness of Self-Inspection: Seeking Opinions

[Fatboy]

Does anyone use a self-inspection (build quality into the product) program at their manufacturing facility? If so, please post a reply on it's worth and effectiveness. In addition, an example of the process/procedure would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[Douglas E. Purdy]

Originally Posted by Fatboy

Does anyone use a self-inspection (build quality into the product) program at their manufacturing facility? If so, please post a reply on it's worth and effectiveness. In addition, an example of the process/procedure would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Pardon my ignorance, but what are you meaning by self-inspection? Are you talking about an Inspection and Test requirements for a product or products that you manufacture?

Doug

[Fatboy]

The term self-inspection is not a good title for my proposal as I just use it here for lack of a better term. This applies to products that we make. Sorry for the confusion.

I am proposing to have the operator be more responsible for their work and build quality into the product instead of a designated inspection department. There is a lot of non-value added redundancy in the current process. The goal is to have the inspectors become auditors of the processes used to build the parts. They may also randomly select parts to inspect prior to shipment.

One might argue that a department totally designated for inspection is not value added. If I build junk and I inspect junk...it's still junk.

[Mike S.]

If by "self-inspection" you mean that the process operator inspects his/her own work, including for final inspection, instead of having "QA" or the "Inspection Dept." do it, I can comment on this.

I have seen it fail terribly and work fairly well, with both instances in the same industry. The place it worked fairly well was much smaller (under 50 people) and the process operators were carefully chosen from a large pool of applicants (cherry picking the workers so to speak) since unemployment was fairly high at the time. Also, they operators were trained extensively and carefully and slowly groomed before being put on their own.

It can work, but if the culture and leadership is not just right, it will fail miserably.

[Craig H.]

Fatboy:

Welcome to the Cove!

I agree with what has been stated so far, but would like to add one caveat.

I suggest you look at your testing equipment and the environment where that equipment will be used. Putting sensitive analytical equipment in a dusty environment, for example, could lead to questionable results with frequent and expensive repair bills. This might not apply to your situation, however.

Craig

[D.Scott]

All good comments - We use what we call In-Process inspections which are done by the operator throughout the process. The supervisor will also do IPIs throughout the day as does the Quality rep. Each time one of these IPIs are done, no matter who does it, we record it in the IPI section of the work order. I agree with Mike - if you aren't on top of this, it can fall flat and fail miserably.

Dave

[Mike S.]

One more point: "Self-inspection" will also generally work better if the parts are somehow traceable to a particular operator. It is somewhat sobering for an operator to know that if he/she screws-up in some way and bad parts get out the door to the customer, that the parts will be traced back to him/her. If this is not possible the task is made more difficult, but not impossible if everything else is just right.

If you feel that you are truly ready for this to work I would advocate, if possible, doing some secret sampling of the outgoing parts for the first few days and at some intervals afterward. DO NOT tell the operators you are going to do this -- it is best if no one else knows. It will be bad if you find bad parts inoutgoing shipments then, but not as bad as if your customer found them.