Collecting Production Data Improves Quality Assurance

If you know something’s broken, you can fix it. But if you know how something got broken, then you can prevent it—and anything like it—from breaking in the first place. Which would you rather be able to do?

In the assembly world, ideally, pieces in production don’t break at all. But, inevitably, they will and they do. That’s why companies have quality assurance programs in the first place—to ensure that faulty products don’t get shipped to the customer. However, even if every mistake is caught before it goes out the door, there’s still room for improvement. By collecting production data on the line, quality assurance programs can help reduce their rate of lost product, increasing factory efficiency and decreasing the risk of product liability.

How Collecting Production Data Can Reduce Lost Product

Collecting production data on the line allows companies to see what’s happening with the product they build as they’re building it. This means they get a fuller picture of process errors than they would by conducting post-completion product quality inspections. It also allows them to find and correct problems in individual products before they are completed, reducing the overall rate of lost product and increasing the average unit production speed. Finally, it generates an ongoing record of production. This documentation is useful both for engineers seeking to improve processes for new products and for demonstrating compliance for products subject to regulatory scrutiny, such as medical devices or aviation components.

For assembly operations primarily using threaded fasteners—like screws and bolts—to assemble their products, automated control systems exist to track each fastener as it is being affixed to the product. Collecting, storing, and analyzing this data can yield valuable production insights.

For instance, analyzing this data can reveal individual fasteners which have higher rates of failure than others. This could be due to an angle of entry, sequence, tooling, or torque control issue. Armed with this knowledge, production engineers can alter the process or equipment used to fasten that individual screw, reducing the likelihood of cross-threading or unfinished rundowns.

Monitoring Production Data Allows for In-Line Quality Control

Monitoring production data also gives production managers the ability to correct errors as they occur, rather than waiting until the product reaches the quality inspection stage. Fastener tracking devices, like screw counters, detect issues such as cross-threading, unfinished rundowns, and omissions.

From there, they can inform line workers or production supervisors in real-time, who can then reset the tool and correct the problem before work progresses to the next screw. While this will hold up production until the issue is corrected, attentive employees can mitigate the issue without sacrificing a significant amount of production time.

The extra time is well worth the expenditure, as it prevents improperly assembled products from moving down the line just to fail at the quality control stage. Any extra time spent assembling a product that is already compromised is wasted time and wasted capacity. Products corrected on the line are also products that have zero chance of being shipped to consumers despite their flaws. This mitigates a substantial liability risk, especially for companies that manufacture products in fields where safety is an issue.

Production Records Inform Regulatory Compliance and Process Improvements

Collecting production data on the line allows companies to generate a detailed production record of every product they’ve assembled. If products are stamped with serial numbers, this gives companies a highly detailed set of production data for each product, potentially reducing liability in the case of product failure in the field. If the production data demonstrates that the product was assembled according to vetted design specifications, then the manufacturer is not responsible for the failure.

Similarly, these records can be used to demonstrate compliance with regulations determining production techniques and standards, and they can be presented to inspectors or regulators if the need arises. Production data, when compared to field results, can also be useful for engineers designing the next generation of products.