How Reliable Is Your Company’s Defect Detection?
It does not really matter what type of business you are in, you need to build up a good customer base and hang on to your existing customers. For this to happen in a free economy, you need satisfied customers and any defects in what you are offering them will neither give them satisfaction nor build up their loyalty to you.
Stopping Defects From Reaching Your Customers
This is where systems for quality control and assurance come into play along with things like quality manuals. In earlier times, managers might have lumped all this together under the simple heading of “inspection”. However, as life becomes more high tech and jargon encroaches on virtually everything, inspection has become a multi-layered concept of interlinked disciplines which, at heart, are all part of the process of defect detection which together aim for the mission statement of “zero defects”.
Methods and equipment used for defect detection vary with the nature of the product or service involved but the results generally fall into two categories:-
* defects of omission – where something that should be there is missing
* defects of commission where something is present but it is incorrect or should not be there.
Either type of defect can be damaging to your business. Minor defects might only lose you a customer but, in this age of litigation, major defects could cost you your entire business. A nut and bolt missing in a machine might cause a fatal accident and a contaminating substance accidentally introduced into food or medical drugs could be equally fatal.
100% Inspection
For many products it is a widely accepted practice to subject product output to what is known as statistical or random testing and inspection. The technique often works and the basis that if (say) 10% of a production run is perfectly OK then there will be no defects in the uninspected 90%. The logic of this makes sense but it does not guarantee that it will hold true and it only takes one defect to escape your control to give you problems once it is found out.
However, applying traditional human inspection methods to every product item produced is hardly practical once your business moves into anything approaching mass production. Furthermore, it may be that the labeling of your product is important and a perfectly correct product packaged with imperfect labeling could be as damaging as a defective product. This is particularly true where FDA regulations apply to your product and people engaged in that type of business need to also look at defect detection methods for their label printing processes.