Koji Corner-5 points to check a good manufacturing line

How can I check how the manufacturer manages the manufacturing process of my product? This time, I will show you the points to distinguish a good manufacturing line.

1.Are the managers or leaders visiting the manufacturing site in person?
2.Is the procedure such that you can see what you should see?
3.Is there any “dangerous” things left unattended?
4.The barrier of failure is broken one after another. Is it changing to a different method or quality check?
5.Is it utilizing the combination of the five senses, intuition and scientific equipment?

1. Are the managers or leaders visiting the manufacturing site in person?

Are multiple people working in the same way? Are the notices of manufacturing line within the deadline? These are points that can help you check whether the managers are visiting in person. There is a tendency to think that “people are doing the right thing when they are not being seen,” so even if there is a mistake in the procedure of the worker, it cannot be corrected without seeing it. A good quality manufacturing line has a complete work procedure in an orderly manner.

2. Is the procedure such that you can see what you should see?

When seeing the same things, there are people who can distinguish it and people who cannot.

Once you can distinguish it, you will understand the view. It takes a little training and effort for our brains to recognize the differences.

The procedure that includes a substantial amount of good and defective sample products and conducts inspection on a regular basis is good manufacturing line.

3. Is there any “dangerous” things left unattended?

A good surgeon seems to take actions that do not cause mistakes even in daily life. For example, if there is a cup in front of the spice jar at the dining table, the cup would be moved first before taking the spice jar.

It seems that the surgeon would never skip the cup and reach for the jar.

Is there anything getting in the way of the workflow? Is there anything protruding in the aisle? Things like these can help you determine whether the manufacturer is paying attention to safety.

4. The barrier of failure is broken one after another. Is it changing to a different method or quality check?

Failures may occur even if a double or triple barrier is set up for safety management or work error prevention.

The common problem is that the double check method does not work. The method of checking by two people, the worker and the leader, tends to overlook a mistake if it is overlooked by the first person.

It is better if the two inspection methods differ in quality or method.

5. Is it utilizing the combination of the five senses, intuition and scientific equipment?

People's sensibilities and intuition are wonderful things to capture even small changes. It is a great advantage when there are skilled workers. If this is used in combination with AI and IoT, the manufacturing power will be strengthened.

Do they manage trend charts of the process data and regularly collect distribution charts? Questions like this can be points to check.

Having a system that regularly checks the data using statistics is a manufacturing line with high awareness of quality improvement. If you make it into graphs, the changes that cannot be seen in the trend charts can be understood through the average value differences of the time periods.