ERP Functions: Quality 2

Last week we briefly looked upon the Check point department of the industry i.e. QA & QC.  Now in this week we shall go one step deeper in understanding the various functions of the department.

As defined in last week there are mainly two areas of Inspections. 1. Incoming Inspection 2. In house Inspection. Now we shall understand what is actually meaning of inspection?

Inspection is general term can be defined as verifying the internal and external (visual or measured) attributes of the item pertaining to its further usage with standard or required attributes and authorizing item for further usage.

So in order to do inspection one has to have the standard attributes that makes the item suitable for further usage. We must note that this standard attribute will different for different type of industries. And it is very much necessary that these standards are properly defined. However no machine can produce 100% exact match of standard ideal item matching all the attributes exactly the same all the time. So a tolerance for deviation from the ideal standard attributes will be defined, again based on further usage of the item. If the produced item attributes does not fall under the tolerance of ideal item, then it is "Not Ok" for further usage. This concept is used in both inhouse and incoming inspections.

In the last paragraph we saw that a decision is to be made based on inspection. There are mainly 4 types of decisions.

1. Accepted: The inspected item attributes fall well inside the tolerance limit of ideal standard attributes.

2. Rejected: The inspected item attributes does not fall well inside the tolerance limit of ideal standard attributes, item produced is not usable further.

3. Rework: The inspected item attributes does not fall well inside the tolerance limit of ideal standard attributes, but with some extra operations/treatment the item can be made further usable.

4. Hold: The inspected item attributes does not fall well inside the tolerance limit of ideal standard attributes, but one is not sure of declaring it as Rejection/Rework at the moment.

Next is how many items are to be inspected while doing inspection? There are 4 standard ways for doing inspection.

1. 100% - Each of the item produced/inwarded is inspected for all the attributes.

2. Quantity/batch - Total produced/inwarded items will be segregated in different batches of equal quantity. In the individual batches a fixed number of items will be inspected and the attributes and the decision for those selected items is considered those of whole batch.

3 Quantity/lot -  In the Total produced/inwarded items a fixed number of items will be inspected and the attributes and the decision for those selected items is considered those of whole lot.

4. Random - This is kind of inspection which is done in Random selection of items from the lot. One may also can choose 0 items!!

So now we are clear on the inspection definition and the methods of doing it. Further we shall see the analysis part of inspection.

Keep watching space.