Top Benefits of Quality Inspection Services for Manufacturing
Did you know that the manufacturing industry was worth around $2.3 trillion as of 2021? The manufacturing industry is one of the most important industries in the world, but it can easily collapse when left unmonitored. Quality assurance is a very important part of any type of manufacturing.
Without quality inspection, it wouldn’t be possible to keep up with any defective products on the assembly line. Most of the products might be fine, but how many have defects? How many should not get shipped out because of these defects?
If problematic products get shipped out, this is bad news for your company. It can give you a reputation for producing low-quality products. You can avoid this issue with quality product inspection.
By using a quality inspection service to keep your products in check, your products will always be in good shape. But what other benefits can you expect from these services? Keep reading and learn more about how it works below.
Look Out for First Article Inspections
Product defects can happen very early in the production process. Less than 5% of your products might get produced at this point. Many people don’t pay much mind to this part of the manufacturing process because it’s so early.
But this is when major defects can start happening. Once defects start occurring so early, it may be hard to catch them later on until it’s too late. Once this happens, it might be impossible to fix the issue, and you’ll have countless defective products being shipped out.
Products become defective for many different reasons. The machines that create them may not work properly, or they may get misaligned. The product materials may be low-quality, or they might have gotten damaged in some way.
First article inspections can help catch defects that happen very early on in the manufacturing process. Whatever is produced in this early stage will be compared to what is supposed to get produced.
There will need to be an approved sample for this.
The Details
If your early products match this approved sample, then they’ll be good to go to the next stage of production. But if there are defects that prevent the products from matching, they will not proceed.
This ensures that defective products don’t go through unnecessary stages of development. The products will instead fit the rest of the production process. If there are any other inspections in the future, these products will pass them as well.
These inspections are very important for high-risk products. Some products may be more prone to defects than others. If you often have problems with these products, then these early inspections can be a big help.
This can save you a lot of time and money.
Pre-shipping Inspections
You need to set an acceptable quality level (AQL) for your products. As long as your products meet this level, they’ll be fine to get shipped out. If they fall below this level, they are too defective and low-quality to leave the manufacturing site.
While first article inspections can help reduce defective products, they can’t get rid of all of them. Defective products may appear later on in the manufacturing process. This would prevent first article inspections from catching them.
This is why you should have several inspections throughout the product manufacturing process. An important option is a pre-shipping inspection. This allows you to get one last look at your products before they’re shipped out.
How It Works
If there is a batch that falls below your AQL, it will have to get discarded or repurposed. There will always be a certain number of defects within a batch. It is sometimes alright to let some of those defects through.
But you should have a defect limit. How many defective products are too many? If your product batch is small, you might not want there to be any more than ten or so defective products.
If your batch is very large, it might be fine to have a hundred or more defective products. If quality is very important to you, you might insist on having a very low number of defective products, though this can be hard to achieve.
Certain types of defects might also be allowed, while others are not. Pre-shipping inspections can gather all this information for you. This makes it easy to get the results you want for your shipments.
Defect Sorting and Product Reworking
Once defects are detected, something has to be done with them. Some manufacturers prefer to discard or destroy their defective products. Others prefer to rework the products until they pass the AQL.
A quality inspection service can help you with both of these possibilities. Defect sorting allows you to learn more about your defective products. You can discover why they became defective and how you can prevent the same problems in the future.
This can also help you avoid delays and extra costs. This allows the manufacturing process to be far more efficient. If there are repeat issues in the process, a quality inspection service can help you eliminate those issues.
You can then refurbish or repair what you have to improve the process further.
The Benefits of Quality Inspection Services
Quality inspection services are ideal if you want to ensure that your products are high-quality. You can weed out defective products early on with first article inspections. You can then determine how many defects are remaining with pre-shipping inspections.
This allows you to closely monitor the number of defects and the quality of your products. Are you ready to improve your product quality? Check out how our services can help.