How good is our Paint Inspection

GilesBee

Registered
Hi all,

We are a bumper manufacturer for Jaguar Land Rover in the UK and, as is to be expected from a premium vehicle manufacturer, they have demanding Quality Standards for their painted products.

We paint the bumpers in our facility, inspect them and then ship them to our sequencing facility close to the customer, where they are inspected again before being assembled and shipped.

Our PPM into the sequencing site is approximately 40,000 - very high you may think. However, our paint line is delivering approximately 300,000 PPM to our initial inspection - primarily dirt in paint, paint runs, contamination - the usual defects one expects from a paint line. Also included in that 40,000 PPM is rejects for damage which could have occurred anywhere after the part was painted.

My question is, How good is our inspection? Our Ops Director is continually beasting us for having high PPM but for me this doesn't take into account the PPM arriving at the first inspection point. I have put a basic measure in place that turns the delivered PPM into an efficiency value given the level of defect arriving at the first inspection station ie we pull out 260,000 of 300,000 PPM and are therefore 87% efficient. Do you think this is a valid measure? Does anyone else have this type of inspection, and if so how do you measure the efficiency?

All guidance & advice gratefully received!
 

Jen Kirley

Quality and Auditing Expert
Leader
Admin
Re: Paint inspection

If you are being beaten up for the inspection process discovering a high defect rate that adds up to a high PPM, I would worry. The issue here should be defects being produced. We have a saying: "Don't shoot the messenger!"

Toward the end of identifying process points for reducing defect rate, it seems reasonable to separate out the inspection points where defects are found. But effectiveness of the inspection process would be measured in how many defects are missed, not how many are detected.
 
P

Popeos

"Quality is designed and produced, not controlled"

Easy to say, I know.
However, if the ratio of ppm at your first inspection is not going down, it means that problems are not solved and that your process is not robust enough.


Now to answer your question : to check efficiency for this type of inspection, I would audit the process of inspection and if control gestures are followed, good lighting conditions, defect libraries and so on, and I would try posion cakes + daily product audit

Popeos
 
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