The Inspection Department’s primary function is to get quality parts to our customers on-time. Delivering quality parts on-time is critical to Fastco’s success. We need to meet our customers’ expectations and demands in order to be a successful company.
Inspection Department to the Rescue!
Inspection is often treated as a “hail Mary” operation – it is the last step to getting parts out the door. If other operations run behind, the Inspection team feels it the most. Often, they get tubs in the day before parts are due and are expected to sort them and get them out the door on-time. It’s an unrealistic expectation born of the reality of manufacturing. The Inspection Department handles unrealistic expectations well.
Trust the Process
In this department, team members are not just boxing up quality parts (although that may be the goal). They are also inspecting for quality concerns. For electronically sorted parts, they run each tub through multiple times due to false fallout and to reduce scrap. Quality and timing issues in cold heading and thread rolling all run downstream and affect inspection’s workload. Therefore, the more issues we catch on the machine, the better off the company is as a whole. Cold heading and thread rolling both work hard to stop quality defects on the machine before they reach the inspection department. But no one is perfect, which is why we work to have a process that is.
Through it all, the Inspection Department will do whatever they can do with the timing they are given. They continue to work hard and get parts out quickly. The department has a very high productivity rate and its members work well together as a team. It’s good to have a team that is so focused on meeting quality and timing demands, even when these two demands seem to conflict. The team trusts the process and serves our customers well.
PLUS – they have a robot on their team named Ellie. How cool is that?