Getting Rid of Part Marking Errors

NDesouza

Involved In Discussions
Hello All,

I recently started a new position in the supplier surveillance industry. I have been assigned to help a few suppliers with some of their issues with quality escapes. These are human errors in part marking caused by the person inputting the information and printing the labels out with a printer. There are excessive quality escapes and SCARs being generated for missing characters, character dimensions are out of tolerance and other issues which go for an entire production run without being caught by several different inspectors. Does anyone have any ideas on how to improve on human error nonconformance issues for manually printed part labels?

thanks,
Nicole
 

John Broomfield

Leader
Super Moderator
Rely not on inspection. Humans sorting the good from the bad is only about 85% effective.

Determine how to mistake proof the process by working with the person inputting the data.

You may, however, find that person is not as competent as the inspectors.
 

Miner

Forum Moderator
Leader
Admin
While this list of Best Practices was more directed toward preventing mislabeled product, there may still be some good ideas for your question. I previously worked at a plant with a large number of subtly different product (right hand/left hand variants). We color coded all of the paperwork associated with each variant, included schematics of the product with differences exaggerated on the paperwork, along with a bar code. The operators at the final operation would scan the bar code to print one label at a time for the product. All labels were designed and programmed into the label printers prior to PPAP and were revisited for every engineering change. The files were locked to prevent editing by unauthorized people.
 

Ninja

Looking for Reality
Trusted Information Resource
There are excessive quality escapes and SCARs being generated for missing characters, character dimensions are out of tolerance and other issues which go for an entire production run without being caught by several different inspectors.
Emphasis added...

That is particularly concerning to me...

Miner's approaches seem pretty rugged and practical, but still rely on humans. Perhaps you need different people doing this if an error goes past "several different inspectors".
We used two, one to make labels, the other responsible for the labels being right (if not correct, resubmit to have them made again).
Shipping was a third label inspection prior to pack-out.
We got escapes down to one per year...
HTH
 

Mike S.

Happy to be Alive
Trusted Information Resource
Yep, sounds to me like they have a system problem not a human error problem.

Is the label complex? Sometimes the labels are long and complex and having a human catch that a label is actually ASSY7762234672A-2 and not ASSY77622234672A-2 is something humans are not well suited to doing. In such cases work to eliminate human involvement as much as possible.
 

optomist1

A Sea of Statistics
Super Moderator
John, is right on...studies I've read = 85% effective on good days, could you share some more info as to the larger process and some pics would be great,,,
 

Jim Wynne

Leader
Admin
John, is right on...studies I've read = 85% effective on good days...
Could you give us a reference to the studies you've read? I think that in a case like this one, 100% inspection isn't likely to help solve the problem completely, but the idea that you can put a universal number on the effectiveness of 100% inspection is just wrong.
 
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