Quality is everything. Failure to maintain a high level of quality can cost your organization upwards of $1 million per incident, and currently accounts for up to 40% of all operating costs in manufacturing companies. Non-conformities, inefficient processes and lost opportunities for sales revenue pile up to create an outsized combination of costs that are simultaneously difficult to identify, and even more difficult to address.
Right now, most companies treat quality as a given. If everything goes according to plan, there’s nothing to worry about. If there’s an unexpected disruption, they contract a containment provider to fix it, seeing the whole thing as an unwanted cost center. In reality, quality can be a value-add opportunity.
Proactive digital containment that is driven by a digital-first inspection model can both reduce the risk of such disruptions, and improve overall quality, helping to drive down the overall cost to your organization. Let’s look at five immediate impacts of making a transition to a digital-first approach and how you can start benefiting from such an approach immediately.
Improved Quality for All Parts
Digital inspection allows you to capture more data and better utilize it from existing equipment, predict the impact of seasonal shifts, industry-wide changes, and major disruptions, and monitor your operations in real-time.
This results in a sweeping impact on your entire organization. When you draw on both past and current data and have the systems in place to analyze them in real-time, you can start evaluating the performance of every component of your organization more proactively. This helps identify area for improvement, commonalities between disruptions, and much more. The result is higher quality for all parts.
Fewer Quality Disruptions
Digital technology also helps to improve the training and performance of your frontline employees. With a digitally connected worker platform, you can provide standardized resources that are updated centrally and in real-time when necessary to keep everyone on the same page. By eliminating gaps in training, providing consistent updates to employees, and keeping everyone connected through digital andon cord, you’ll benefit from fewer disruptions in the first place.
More Time for Supplier Quality Engineers
The benefit of fewer disruptions, a faster resolution to the disruptions that occur, and a higher base level of quality is that your supplier quality engineers will have more time to focus on what they do best - creating value in the organization through continuous improvement programs. Instead of a thing they should be working on but don’t have time for, it becomes something they can consistently leverage to help your business improve.
A Scalable Solution When Disruptions Occur
No amount of quality management can guarantee you’ll never see another quality disruption. But with the right combination of technology and proactive efforts, you can scale your efforts to deal with a major disruption much faster. Faster, more effective training, better-organized inspections, and a database of information on past quality issues to draw on mean it takes less time to develop and implement an inspection plan when you do have a quality issue.
Immediate Access to Vital Information for Decision Makers
Stakeholders need to know what’s going on, why it’s happening at all, and what can be done to prevent such a problem from recurring in the future. A digital inspection process makes it possible to access these insights in real-time. They have the power to make faster decisions based on concrete data in the future.
Transitioning to a Value-Add Approach to Quality
When you leverage a proactive containment model that is driven by continuous improvement, working in tandem with your SQA Engineers to improve your entire business, you reduce the cost of future disruptions, the frequency of quality issues overall, and generally improve operations across the board. Learn more about how to accelerate quality improvement through digital containment in our eBook:
