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Failure Analysis: Reducing Your Downtime
Another important quality control activity is Failure Analysis, sometime called Analyzing Downtime.
Failures are very costly events that are not predicted. They must be completely understood so that they can be avoided. If a typical production line were to stop due to an unplanned failure for even a short period of time, the costs can be significant, once all the impacts are considered. Some of these impacts are:
- lost production capacity
- idle workers
- scrapped product
- increased overhead costs
In an effort to reduce downtime, most manufacturers record events for later analysis.
In a typical manufacturing plant failures are usually tracked by the maintenance department off the production line itself. There can be large gaps in the number and type of failures reported and detailed analysis is very difficult or sometimes even impossible.
By automating the recording of failures some of the issues of lost data and/or subjective, inconsistent reporting is avoided. Moreover, once data is in digital form, it can analysed and measured very quickly. Busitech's suite of Quality Window products is an Excel®lent solution that not only offers data collection solutions, but also offers powerful statistical reviews. With an accurate and detailed database of events to analyse, Quality Window can uncover previously hidden trends and root causes for failures.
The tri-eto chart shown below represents relatively new thinking in process operations. Most companies will do a straight pareto chart that unfortunately does not weight the variable against other factors such as cost.
Quality Window can also calculate and display time between failures, a function previously not available without with a large investment in manpower and effort. By determining what the average mean time between failures is, a proactive manufacturing team can devise maintenance procedures to greatly reduce future events and optimize production.
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