Beacon Quality Blog

When many of us think of a road map we envision an unwieldy, impossible-to-fold item that our parents or grandparents used for navigating the family’s vacation route before the days of GPS. But, according to Webster’s online dictionary, a road map is also a detailed plan to guide progress toward a goal. If your goal is to conduct layered process audits (LPAs) that not only meet customer requirements but also enhance the culture of quality in your organization, then you need a comprehensive road map or checklist to reach your destination.

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With most endeavors the amount of detail and forethought you devote to your preparations, the better your final result, and layered process audits (LPAs) are no exception. One of the most significant tasks of implementing an LPA system is writing the questions for your LPA checklists. Spending time upfront to investigate what has gone wrong in the past with your processes provides valuable insight for preparing an audit checklist that covers all the bases to satisfy your customers and promote a culture of quality throughout your organization.

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You’ve heard it before: What gets measured gets done. Part of planning to reach an objective is measuring what must be improved in order to move forward—in a word, metrics. Metrics give companies a way to define success and a path toward achieving their goals.

Quality Standards

Plant managers and owners strive to ensure that their plants comply with quality standards. One of the best ways to achieve this is to use metrics.

Employing an array of key metrics can help assure that plant personnel identifies details that ultimately make up the objective and meet the standards quality owners and managers require. Having definite measurements, targets, and planned actions (the first three parts of the SMART mnemonic: Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, Time-Based) helps achieve the high standards managers and owners set while recognizing that goals that are too lofty often can lead to worker discouragement.

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The unique value of layered process audits (LPAs) stems from building an effective layering system where you have fresh eyes conducting audits on a consistent basis. LPAs involve employees from all levels of an organization, from operators to senior management, who devote periodic attention to core processes. Unfortunately, what makes LPAs so beneficial to your organization also makes them cumbersome—as the sheer number of audits and auditors involved can create scheduling headaches.

The good news is that you can reduce the time-consuming tasks associated with assigning and scheduling audits by using audit management software. For example, you can easily build a schedule where first-level supervisors are performing audits on every shift while top-level management representatives, such as a plant manager, complete at least one audit per week.

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A few things in life are required—we simply have no choice but to do them—like paying taxes. Some quality managers would compare the often-mandatory requirement of completing layered process audits (LPAs) to calculating taxes—both are cumbersome and are easily forgotten once the requirement is met. But what if there was an effective solution to simplifying your LPA process and at the same time adding value to your organization? 

LPAs are a sub-type of process audits; and they differ from generic process audits by requiring multiple people, including management, to conduct an ongoing chain of simple verifications to ensure that a defined process is followed correctly. LPAs provide an active view into operational process conformance and corrective actions as required by many end manufacturers (such as automakers) to maintain supplier quality. When implemented correctly, LPAs can help shape your organization’s culture into one that embraces continuous improvement. This powerful audit management methodology can:

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Who doesn’t like a clean workspace?

Your job is to deliver the correct parts to the correct place at the correct time—efficiently and consistently.

Cleaning, organizing and standardizing your plant and office helps you accomplish this because a clean, organized and standardized workplace builds efficiency and consistency. Picture in your mind the difference between a clean and a messy work place and you know what we mean.

Implementing 5S will improve your workplace and your profits. 5S stands for:

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U.S. auto sales are on pace to exceed 17 million units this year and could break the record of 17.4 million sold in 2000, according to Autodata Corporation. Backing these figures is the Automotive News Data Center, which reports that sales for the first eight months of 2015 outperformed sales for the same period in 2014. For example, Daimler AG posted a 6.4% increase in sales compared to 2014, Ford Motor was up 2.7% for the first eight months, and General Motors showed a 3.2% increase from the previous year.

Many automakers are running their U.S. plants with three shifts of workers and scheduling overtime, particularly factories that make pickup trucks, SUVs, and crossovers. Of course, the automakers’ success in extending this upswing depends on the ability of their suppliers to keep up with industry growth. For tier one automotive suppliers the pressure to meet demand must be carefully balanced with the ability to maintain and even improve quality. This is where lean manufacturing principles come into play.

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Research studies show that manufacturers estimate their cost of quality at approximately 10 percent of revenues, while, in reality, that figure is double that at 20 percent. While statistics like this are eye catching, it’s important to understand what is meant by the term, cost of quality. Unfortunately, it’s a widely misunderstood concept. Many organizations view the cost of quality solely in reference to failure costs. Common examples of activities related to this line of thinking include:

• Rework
• Scrap
• Returned materials
• Warranty recalls

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In a routine audit one of your auditors discovers that during a recent production shift a seasoned employee used fastener B, despite a work instruction for the process that calls for the use of fastener C. A typical investigation of this type of nonconformance would likely note operator error as the cause.

While concluding that this was a case of operator error is an accurate description of what happened and how it happened, if you accept this conclusion you probably haven’t probed deeply enough to understand the root cause. According to the American Society for Quality (ASQ), a root cause is "a factor that caused a nonconformance and should be permanently eliminated through process improvement."

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