Occurance of Non-Conformance, MRB (Material Review Board) and Record keeping

[Wes Bucey]

Had a recent nonconforming item in our shop. Want to put up annoucement, do some retraining and possibly generate a flyer or notice that includes a picture of the item and some words. Does anybody have an example of a notice they used to communicate a nonconforming item to plant personnel. I have looked for some templates in WORD, but not found anything useful. I think a notice/flyer would be good to increase awareness throughout the plant. Any ideas or suggestions???

Whatever you use, I would suggest limiting circulation to personnel who actually had "hands on" connection with product to either make it, inspect it, or ship it, avoiding an appearance of holding those folk up to "ridicule" from others. Most importantly, the document should have a sense of "opportunity for improvement" (OFI) versus "Tsk! Tsk!"

OFI means you have

1. researched the root cause
2. set up an error proofing process to prevent recurrence in the future
3. absolutely avoid any hint of "detection after the product becomes nonconforming."

 

[QCALPINE]

Thanks. I guess I am a little upset after weeks of working to get back in business, laying people off and then recalling them and not to forget all the hoops we jumped through. As we should have. There is probably too much TSK, TSK in the message below:

OOPS!!!!
We did it wrong again. After weeks of working to get Company XXX back on line, first time back in business our parts were rejected because of ___________.


If you see a problem, have a concern or question about a job then contact Management (XXX or YYY) and Quality (ZZZ or QQQ) IMMEDIATELY

It takes all of us working together with our eyes open to make sure we produce the quality parts our customers expect.

The graphics didn't paste in, but I had hands covering mouth and then later someone shaking their head, along with photo of item.

I will consider your suggestion.

 

[QCALPINE]

What do you mean by absolutely no hint of detection after the nonconformity?

 

[Wes Bucey]

Re: Occurrence of Non-Conformance, MRB (Material Review Board) and Record keeping

What do you mean by absolutely no hint of detection after the nonconformity?

Good question! I did not consider my audience when I wrote that.

One of the hallmarks of modern Quality theory is to
"PREVENT nonconformance versus DETECT nonconformance."

If you wait until AFTER the product has been produced or the service performed to discover/detect a nonconformance, you have spent money on materials and resources producing a product or service that cannot be sold to a customer without repair or rework, costing MORE money, eroding the profit on the product or service to the point of often generating a loss - in one case, a company was effectively sending free products to the customer wrapped in ten dollar bills because of the losses incurred in producing scrap (non-conforming parts.)

Once you do detect a nonconformance, it is often cost-effective to shut down production until you learn the root cause of the nonconformance and take action to prevent recurrence, usually by changing some aspect of the process.

Therefore, not only do you want to call attention to detecting a non-conforming product, but alert the folks to the need for determining what the root cause of the nonconformance was and formulating a Corrective Action to prevent recurrence..

 

[QCALPINE]

Thanks. I have performed a root cause analysis and have started implementing corrective actions. It is always best to prevent versus detect, but in this case it just didn't happen. and it wasn't anything I even suspected could have occurred. Experience is a great teacher. But rework is definitely expensive and at the top of my list to eliminate.