S
SimpleIsGood
Hello Fellow Quality Geeks,
I work for a company that makes assemblies and guess what? We don't always assemble them correctly! This annoys our customer who often pay a lot of money for these assemblies, and just hate it when they are wrong or late. I'm looking for suggestions for improvement.
1) Specifically, how can I even MEASURE process capability? And,
2) How can I make sure each and every assembly is made to match the print each and every time?
I don't want to say what we make (it's a pretty small industry), but the parts have from 5-50 pieces per assembly, and we usually make them in batches of 5-50 pieces. Many of them are large and expensive.
We certainly want to make our customer happy, but even inspecting the products is tricky because their are enough parts to make inspecting each nut, bolt, bracket and Helicoil on each finished assembly impractical, or at least a huge pain in the assets. On the other hand, each and every piece can be made wrong, put in wrong, cosmetically unacceptable, crooked or missing.
I'm trying to help make things better, but the problem makes me feel like this:
and like this:
Customer ask, and I can't blame them, "How could you miss that?"
The only things I've come up with is that we stop and start too much. We run out of parts, stop to help on another project, stop to get more parts (some of them are so big you can't keep 20 of them in the work cell), stop to pack assemblies, stop to unpack parts, stop to help on another project, stop to make a shipment, stop to do a trash run (or the work area overflows with packaging materials). Other than that, I don't know where to start.
Suggestions much appreciated. Thanks.
I work for a company that makes assemblies and guess what? We don't always assemble them correctly! This annoys our customer who often pay a lot of money for these assemblies, and just hate it when they are wrong or late. I'm looking for suggestions for improvement.
1) Specifically, how can I even MEASURE process capability? And,
2) How can I make sure each and every assembly is made to match the print each and every time?
I don't want to say what we make (it's a pretty small industry), but the parts have from 5-50 pieces per assembly, and we usually make them in batches of 5-50 pieces. Many of them are large and expensive.
We certainly want to make our customer happy, but even inspecting the products is tricky because their are enough parts to make inspecting each nut, bolt, bracket and Helicoil on each finished assembly impractical, or at least a huge pain in the assets. On the other hand, each and every piece can be made wrong, put in wrong, cosmetically unacceptable, crooked or missing.
I'm trying to help make things better, but the problem makes me feel like this:
and like this:
Customer ask, and I can't blame them, "How could you miss that?"
The only things I've come up with is that we stop and start too much. We run out of parts, stop to help on another project, stop to get more parts (some of them are so big you can't keep 20 of them in the work cell), stop to pack assemblies, stop to unpack parts, stop to help on another project, stop to make a shipment, stop to do a trash run (or the work area overflows with packaging materials). Other than that, I don't know where to start.
Suggestions much appreciated. Thanks.