At our factory, we have a wonderful electronic shop floor control system. Every time someone touches a product, they scan its unique barcode. The system checks what operation needs to be performed on that specific unit, and checks that the person has the training needed to do that operation. If the person finds a defect on the product, they select the location of the defect from a drop-down menu, and select the nature of the defect from another drop-down menu.
Our system then won't let that unit of product have anything else done on it until someone trained to rework (fix) that issue makes the fix. If there are multiple defects, each one has to be fixed.
The system then won't let that unit of product have anything else done on it until a separate person, who is trained in inspection, verifies that each fix was done properly.
The system then makes the unit go back to the previous test or inspection step, to make sure nothing else got messed up. Then the unit is allowed to go on through the other operations in the factory.
So, any defects that are found get fixed, and get inspected by a separate, independent person to ensure they are fixed. Good?
EXCEPT, sometimes you can't easily get to what you're fixing, because another part is in the way. So you might need to loosen another part, or take another part off completely, just to get to the part that needs to be fixed. And you might forget to reinstall the other part, or might not do it properly.
And the person verifying the fix doesn't know that you had to loosen or remove the other part. And each fix is a little bit different, needing to come in from different angles. And some people doing the fixing have bigger hands than others. So you can't program the electronic shop floor control system to automatically know that fixing Part ABC requires you to loosen part XYZ.
So, we're really good at fixing defects that we know about. And we're really good at catching problems at the exact location that was fixed. But we sometimes get secondary defects created by the initial fix, and those are really hard to catch.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2024-01-26 02:09 am (UTC)At our factory, we have a wonderful electronic shop floor control system. Every time someone touches a product, they scan its unique barcode. The system checks what operation needs to be performed on that specific unit, and checks that the person has the training needed to do that operation. If the person finds a defect on the product, they select the location of the defect from a drop-down menu, and select the nature of the defect from another drop-down menu.
Our system then won't let that unit of product have anything else done on it until someone trained to rework (fix) that issue makes the fix. If there are multiple defects, each one has to be fixed.
The system then won't let that unit of product have anything else done on it until a separate person, who is trained in inspection, verifies that each fix was done properly.
The system then makes the unit go back to the previous test or inspection step, to make sure nothing else got messed up. Then the unit is allowed to go on through the other operations in the factory.
So, any defects that are found get fixed, and get inspected by a separate, independent person to ensure they are fixed. Good?
EXCEPT, sometimes you can't easily get to what you're fixing, because another part is in the way. So you might need to loosen another part, or take another part off completely, just to get to the part that needs to be fixed. And you might forget to reinstall the other part, or might not do it properly.
And the person verifying the fix doesn't know that you had to loosen or remove the other part. And each fix is a little bit different, needing to come in from different angles. And some people doing the fixing have bigger hands than others. So you can't program the electronic shop floor control system to automatically know that fixing Part ABC requires you to loosen part XYZ.
So, we're really good at fixing defects that we know about. And we're really good at catching problems at the exact location that was fixed. But we sometimes get secondary defects created by the initial fix, and those are really hard to catch.