Naturally, you want to run the most efficient business possible. You want to eliminate loss in all its hideous forms. When it comes to manufacturing and producing your goods, then there’s one form that’s more heinous than all the rest. We’re talking, of course, about defective products. All the resources and materials that went into them, all the time spent creating them: suddenly gone. It’s not a fault in business you should accept for too long. You need to narrow down the causes and eradicate them.
Equipment faults
Take a closer look at the equipment that you’re using to create your goods. Rare is the piece of manufacturing equipment that has no risk of fault or error in itself. If there is even a minute problem, then it could drastically alter the shape and properties of your product. Even worse, faulty equipment is an easy way to increase the risk of accident and injury in the business. That’s why it’s not enough to just perform reactive maintenance when a problem arises. You need to develop a strict schedule of preventative maintenance, including cleaning and scheduled part replacement for those components that are most likely to go faulty first. As preventive maintenance is important, proper maintenance also means that any one piece of equipment is likely to last you a lot longer, giving you a much better return on investment for it.
Contamination
Have you carefully considered what materials and components actually go into the products that you’re creating? When you think about the protection of materials in manufacturing, your first thought might be protecting your staff from hazardous materials. But some materials need just as much protection for people and environment alike. If you’re not using the right environments and the right packaging for handling some sensitive materials, you could find that you end up with more contaminated and faulty goods. If you don’t already have them installed, it’s worth looking into using measures like clean room processing and packaging. You should see Laser Light’s cleanroom processing packaging for more details on the kind of protection this can give your goods.
Human error
Where there are humans, there are risks of human error. There’s no getting around it. All you can do is reduce the risk as much as possible. A lot of production lines seek to do that by relying more on automated equipment which needs less involvement from human operators. If you can’t afford that at the moment, then you should simply consider addressing any productivity and focus problems within your team. Make sure you’re incentivizing good work, offering constructive criticism in a helpful way, and ensuring that you’re getting as much employee satisfaction from your team as possible.
You need to closely study which risk is the most prevalent in your business. Is your team letting you down? Is your equipment? Are your materials not being handled properly? Without identifying which problem is resulting in faulty goods and eliminating them, you’ll just have to get used with the margins of loss you already have.
