Beacon Quality Blog

If you’re a plant manager, you might not be excited about conducting layered process audits in your facility. Between monitoring plant metrics, managing your team and putting out the latest fire, there’s little room to add yet one more task to your already packed schedule.

It’s understandable given the time and resources required to perform layered process audits (LPAs), which require adding daily and even shift-level checks to team members’ responsibilities.

You might be thinking, “My team is already busy, and now I have to tell other busy people to do more busy work? No thanks.”

In reality, a well-executed LPA program is far more than just another flavor-of-the-month quality initiative. It can help plant managers achieve key goals, including creating a culture of quality and safety, providing insight into plant health and eliminating hidden nonconformances that increase quality costs. Let’s take a look at how.

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In our new Q&A column, we’re interviewing top manufacturing experts about industry trends and solutions to common quality challenges.

We recently talked with Casper Zublin, president of International Rubber Products (IRP), about rising quality expectations, Industry 4.0 and how to build a culture of quality. IRP’s three divisions manufacture liquid silicone rubber for medical device components (IRP Medical), precision rubber rollers (ABBA Roller) and elastomer components for aerospace and defense (MikronPMP Aerospace).

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Do layered process audits drive real improvement in your organization? Or are they just another hoop to jump through for customers like General Motors (GM) and Fiat Chrysler (FCA)?

Layered process audits are comprised of quick checks of high-risk processes, preventing defects by identifying when people aren’t working to standard. While each audit only lasts about 10 minutes, they also take place daily, creating an administrative burden that leads many manufacturers to simply treat them as busy work.

This “check the box” attitude creates its own avalanche of problems.

Completion rates are low, delivering little data. People pencil-whip audits by passing every item blindly—a problem for nearly half of respondents in our State of LPA survey. Completed checklists become an overflowing pile of unfinished paperwork, waiting for someone to enter and analyze the findings. When auditors do uncover problems, they may not receive the proper follow-up, sending the message that management doesn’t actually care.

It’s a vicious cycle that adds up to huge amounts of wasted time and money considering the effort required to set up, manage and track LPAs. Ultimately, this bare minimum compliance approach also means more defects, complaints and warranty costs. That’s because process failures lead to product failures, and if nobody’s looking for them, they will continue to impact quality.

In this post, we examine how to break this cycle, leveraging strategies like checklist design, problem-solving and automation to get more from LPAs and move beyond compliance.

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Quality is actually quite simple—it’s the human element that makes it difficult. We all know it can be challenging to get employees to follow a standardized set of steps, as people often have their own reasons for taking shortcuts or deviating from the established standard.

The problem is that when people deviate from standards, you’re less likely to achieve the desired outcome. That’s where layered process audits (LPAs) can make a big difference, providing frequent process verifications that address the human element of process adherence.

 In this post, we’ll look at how LPAs help create a culture of quality in manufacturing plants, promoting process conformance and employee engagement. The payback is in improved quality metrics and lower cost of poor quality.

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Experts say that the cost of quality totals roughly 10% in the average organization, with some companies facing quality costs of up to 40%.

If your plant is on the middle to upper end of these estimates, it’s likely company leadership considers your plant in need of immediate intervention.

But what quality management solutions do you have if you’re trying to turn around a struggling plant, especially if problems are complex and habits deeply ingrained? If you’re not sure where to start, you might consider whether one of these three proven strategies could help you achieve the substantial change you need.

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Management expert Philip Crosby famously asserted that quality is free, declaring that managing defects always costs more than doing things right the first time.

It’s even the title of his 1979 book Quality Is Free, which provides Crosby’s detailed quality maturity grid for helping organizations evaluate their performance.

Quality management maturity should obviously be every auto and aerospace manufacturer’s goal, but it can be hard to get from point A to point B. High-frequency audit strategies, specifically layered process audits (LPAs), provide a defined path for getting there.

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Equipment downtime gets expensive fast in automotive and aerospace manufacturing, a risk many companies try to mitigate by storing spare parts onsite. A machine breaks down, haul out the parts and hopefully you’re back in business with minimal disruption.

The problem is, manufacturers get so wrapped up in hitting production targets that they don’t stop to ask why the machine went down in the first place.

The result? The equipment goes down again, whether two days, two weeks or two months later, causing additional downtime because the “corrective” action was never designed to last.

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Boeing is demanding its suppliers to reduce their prices by 10% according to a February article published in Bloomberg Business Week. It’s a hard pill for many to swallow given that that these cuts are on top of the roughly 15% cuts demanded in 2012 when the company launched its Partnering for Success program.

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Pareto’s Law, also known as the 80/20 rule, tells us that 20% of inputs are responsible for 80% of results. Even when it’s not an even 80/20 split, the idea that a few factors drive a large proportion of outcomes applies to many business processes and everyday situations.

Like how a majority of complaints often result from a few key defects. Or how 20% of our time accounts for 80% of our productivity, with the remaining 80% spent on meaningless tasks.

In the automotive and aerospace industries, organizations can use a range of tools to leverage the 80/20 rule for bigger, faster quality improvements. Pareto management is the most obvious of these, but manufacturers should also apply the rule to performance metrics, risk management and audits.

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