Michigan manufacturer Caster Concepts discovers the counterintuitive nature of quality control
A new article in The Fabricator shares:
Good quality control (QC) can be central to a fabricator’s success. If jobs don’t meet specs or the demands of downstream operations and the final customer, rework—the costliest form of waste—can skyrocket. QC is supposed to help prevent that.
QC also is a bit counterintuitive: Job-flow velocity matters. Caster Concepts, an Albion, Mich., manufacturer of heavy-duty casters and automated material handling equipment, noticed this immediately when it underwent a significant manufacturing transformation more than two decades ago. As it turns out, the better parts flowed, the easier and more effective QC got.
Enter QRM
Back in the early 2000s, Caster Concepts was searching for ways to streamline its process and improve its lead times and on-time delivery. As a company that delivers specialized products for a range of industries, product mix was unpredictable and lot sizes were highly variable. The company had reached out to some lean manufacturing consultants but didn’t have much success. Then, the production managers got into some reading that seemed to ring true for their high-product-mix operation.
The first was Eli Goldratt’s “The Goal,” the fictional narrative that describes the finer points behind the theory of constraints (manage flow by your bottleneck). The next was “It’s About Time” by Rajan Suri, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the founder of the —Center for Quick Response Manufacturing, or QRM.
As Andrew Dobbins, vice president of manufacturing, recalled, “QRM really changed how we operate the manufacturing side of the business. We had manufacturing resources, but we weren’t applying them where they were needed. We had all this historical data, and we had thought the inventory we were making was the right inventory, that we were making the right products. That wasn’t always the case. We knew we had to find a more effective manufacturing process.”
Continue reading: https://www.thefabricator.com/thefabricator/article/shopmanagement/the-quality-benefits-of-quick-response-in-metal-fabrication
