Seamless quality control is essential, especially for industrial companies. This is the only way companies can be sure of delivering high-quality, flawless products to their customers.
The majority of quality control has been automated in many companies in recent years. M2M communication, blockchain and AI-supported quality management systems are just a few of the buzzwords here. With a well thought-out digitalization concept, these methods can undoubtedly be used to create efficient and resource-saving production processes.
However, manufacturers of products with small batch sizes and high variance in particular face the challenge that not all sub-processes can be fully controlled by machines and their sensors. The focus here is on data collection from manual processes, which are still often carried out using emails, Excel or paper checklists. The keyword here is human-generated data. Analog documentation is almost impossible to evaluate, prone to errors and difficult to retrieve.
Products are often still checked using paper-based checklists!
Whether for manufacturers of special machines, production systems or special vehicles, the exact requirements and specifications vary from project to project – and therefore also the quality control requirements at the end of the manufacturing process. The custom-made products are checked on the basis of previously defined inspection points and recorded in paper checklists.
Paper certainly has its advantages – but analyzability is not one of them. The information collected on the checklists can only be transferred to other systems (e.g. ERP systems, analytics tools, etc.) and reused after an enormous amount of time. In the end, the information contained ends up completely unused in a folder that ends up in the trash after the legal retention period. First things first:
Information is data. And data is valuable. Only on the basis of an accurate database can improvements be made and high quality guaranteed in the long term.
A survey on digital processes in companies was conducted in 2020. Although every tenth large company has already established digital processes, the proportion of paper-based processes is still considerable.
Challenges with paper-based checklists:
- Time-consuming data acquisition
- No consistent documentation
- Difficult to read
- Time-consuming archiving and retrieval
- Lack of transparency
- Time delay
- Error-prone
Digital data acquisition as a basis for product and process optimization.
Information on the paper checklists can certainly also be used to make improvements to processes or products. In reality, however, this means that an employee would have to look through the individual folders and lists by hand and search for patterns in the documents using self-defined criteria. Is that the case? It is much more likely that the folders are left in their cupboards and only taken out in an emergency to react to a problem instead of taking preventative action.
Yet there is so much more to the checklists. Errors, defects and weak points in the products and processes could be uncovered, rectified and avoided in the future by analyzing the data in detail. Exact throughput times can be identified and structured data can be recorded down to the smallest verifiable individual step. This in turn can form the basis for predictive maintenance methods or simply mean that process deviations can be addressed much more quickly and accurately. For efficient analysis, however, the information from the operational quality controls must be available digitally. In the case of paper checklists, this means manually transferring the information to the IT system and, if necessary, manually adding photos. This requires, among other things, a dedicated employee and a lot of time, depending on how many checklists there are.
If the quality control tests are recorded digitally right away, the extra work step for transferring them to the system is not necessary and the quality data is immediately available for other tasks. By digitally recording quality data in even the smallest inspection steps, the reduction of resources in production control is supported. Repeated quality checks in production processes and final inspections enable seamless quality assurance without any media disruptions. This in turn leads to increased product and process quality and strengthens competitiveness in the market environment.
Conclusion.
In industry, and European industry in particular, quality is one of the most important success factors. The trend away from pure cost thinking and cheap production towards quality orientation offers a huge competitive advantage for European producers. With digital quality control solutions, this competitive advantage can not only be maintained, but even extended! The digital data and the resulting evaluation results help to further optimize processes and products and ensure the long-term success of your own products.
