Quality inspections are integral to a robust quality management program, encompassing the role of a quality inspector. The processes of pre-shipment inspection and production inspection play key roles in ensuring product integrity. Paradoxically, despite their importance, ensuring that individuals perform these inspections properly, or perform them at all, poses one of the greatest challenges for quality managers. This challenge extends to various aspects, including the critical assessment of raw materials and the manufacturing process. The effectiveness of the overall quality inspection process hinges heavily on the diligence and expertise of the quality inspector, who plays a pivotal role in conducting thorough pre-shipment and production inspections.
Senior managers may only care about the number of inspections that are completed, not how they are done.
This leads to pencil-whipping by field personnel, which defeats the purpose of having a quality program in the first place.
It’s also common for field personnel to resist performing inspections because they don’t want to add more processes and paperwork to their intense workloads.
Regardless of the reason for non-compliance, it is crucial to foster understanding among the people in your organization, including quality inspectors, about the importance of inspections. By ensuring that they grasp the concept of quality management and recognize the benefits it brings to both the organization and their individual roles, you can enhance their active participation in the production process and final inspection.
Senior Management Is Not Invested in Quality Improvement
One reason companies adopt a quality program is for insurance reasons. When this is the case, the goals from senior management's perspective are to perform various inspections, such as pre-production inspection and quality control inspection, with a focus on documentation purposes. These inspections serve to prove compliance with industry standards and regulations, aiming to protect against future lawsuits.
In such scenarios, having a quality management-focused approach becomes essential for ensuring comprehensive coverage and adherence to stringent quality standards throughout the production process. This includes meticulous pre-production inspection and ongoing quality control inspections to proactively address potential issues, ultimately enhancing overall product quality and minimizing risks.
Although these are all valid outcomes of a quality program, there are many other benefits that the company could be getting from its quality management processes.
If senior management is primarily interested in having a quality program just to check off a box for an insurance company or client, talk to them about how quality management benefits the organization by improving product quality over time through required inspections.
For example, using quality inspections to heighten awareness about the most common mistakes leads to more work done right the first time (first time quality), fewer errors, shorter punchlists, less re-work, and larger profits per job.
If this approach doesn’t shift the overall goals of the quality program, focus on what they care about most: documentation and due diligence.
If these are the goal, make it clear that expecting field personnel to do inspections purely for compliance reasons is unrealistic.
Resulting in Inspections being missed, and when they are done, it is with the minimum level of effort at best.
This puts quality controllers in a policing role and that is a sure recipe for adversarial relationships and ultimate failure.
In order for a program like this to be successful, the quality department must have the capacity to perform inspections themselves and that can’t happen without more resources and dedicated personnel to perform inspections.
Field Personnel Does Not See the Value of Quality Management
If management is committed to achieving continuous improvement in quality but encounters difficulty in obtaining field personnel compliance with the required inspections, the quality manager can play a critical role. By demonstrating that the quality control process can actually enhance the ability of personnel in the field to perform their jobs better, the quality manager can encourage active participation in inspections and foster a culture of quality improvement.
Rather than playing the role of policemen, quality managers should make it clear that they are there to support field personnel and to help them be more successful.
To optimize efficiency for field personnel, it is imperative to establish a thorough quality program. This program should encompass specific inspection criteria, fostering a process-oriented approach aimed at continuous improvement. Integrating quality control inspections becomes pivotal in identifying and rectifying recurring issues within manufacturing processes. By implementing robust quality control methods, the program aims to minimize callbacks, ultimately leading to a higher success rate in completing tasks correctly on the initial attempt. Furthermore, the program should include detailed inspection reports, providing a comprehensive overview of the results and offering insights into areas for improvement in both quality control methods and manufacturing processes.
This doesn't mean doing inspections for them, but helping them see the value in doing them right.
Field personnel have to trust that quality managers will take action to make improvements based on the information provided during the inspection process.
If they don’t see improvement, they won’t see the point in doing inspections and will start pencil-whipping to get the paperwork done faster.
Quality inspections are a tool for field personnel to communicate issues in the field. Show them the value of this process by:
- Giving immediate feedback after an inspection is performed to demonstrate that the report is being read and processed
- Starting a conversation about issues found during inspections to learn more about why they are occurring
- Taking action—take one of the issues important to field personnel and do something to fix the problem—to demonstrate that you are taking steps toward improvement
- Using data from inspections to report improvements and reductions in the most commonly recurring issues
- Following up with field personnel when they report additional related issues
When this process is successfully implemented, the people working in the field will see that quality is more of a help than a hindrance and that quality managers are there to support them.
Change Starts at the Top
No matter what approach you take to get people to do inspections, it’s important to remember that change starts at the top.
If you don’t have buy-in from senior management, you’ll have a hard time enforcing any new processes. Use our free presentation template as a starting point to get senior management on the same page about why first-time quality should be the goal.
