COPQ—Cost of Poor Quality—is a quality measure used across a variety of industries in modern day. It’s especially important in the manufacturing world, where scrapped parts are a serious expense and even an hour of downtime can costs millions.
As a daily quality control practice, evaluating COPQ involves appraising the different costs of quality control and quality problems, in order to prevent and reduce them at the source. Costs are divided into two main categories: direct and indirect. Direct cost refers to things that have a clear value, or an immediate dollar cost that can be calculated. Indirect costs are a little harder to calculate, referring to indirect effects on profit like poor word of mouth, negative press, or changes in consumer reputation.
There are a lot of different costs, particularly direct ones, in a fully-automated factory with many moving parts. Thus, direct costs are divided further for analysis—into ‘controllable’ and ‘resultant’ categories. Controllable costs are expenses that are within a manufacturer’s direct control, such as the amount of destructive testing performed, consulting expenses, and salaries of QA staff. Resultant costs are outcomes with a financial impact: scrap, rework, rejects and downtime.
Advanced COPQ practice can break down costs categories even further, but these are some of the basic categories that most professionals in automotive manufacturing should know. But while understanding costs is fairly simple, analyzing, and addressing them on the factory floor is often a more challenging task.
Better quality products at lower production costs means higher efficiency, and driving efficient production is a chief goal for anyone involved in auto manufacturing. For all types of costs defined in COPQ—direct and indirect, controllable and resultant–there are ways to reduce them. For example, scrapped parts may be used for another purpose, or poorly-performing suppliers reevaluated. But common cost-cutting strategies can have a minimal effect where most processes are automated, and don’t addressed the most pressing cost items in a car factory (like excessive downtime). Even understanding what the costs are and what is causing them is difficult–with root cause analysis of costs being almost impossible in some cases.
What quality engineers need is a multitool. And that’s why Dressler Automation developed RoboLive®. RoboLive® was developed in-house by our automation professionals as a tool to finally understand robotic joining process data. It includes process visualization, change tracking, a production timeline, and more based on both nominal (planned) and actual data direct from all robots. Using RoboLive® customizable error warnings and reports, anyone in the factory can easily understand trends in performance and maintenance history, meaning you’ll finally be equipped to understand and combat costs in manufacturing.
Personnel expenses, for example, are a major direct-controllable cost. In many cases, critical production knowledge is limited to a few specialized employees—or makeshift in-house quality systems require round-the-clock tinkering by dedicated staff. RoboLive® eliminates these problems; it runs automatically once it’s set up with no intervention, and presents all essential data in an easy-to-understand visualization and data table.
Downtime is another big expense: when production issues are detected by QA, production is often ground to a halt for a lengthy RCA process—plus the time needed to actually solve the problem. By providing all production data—including weld/glue parameters, process locations, IDs, and robots—in a searchable format, RoboLive® makes identifying and repairing production problems faster than ever before.
Recall is a word that nobody wants to hear, and it comes with a host of expenses both direct and indirect: scrapped products and loss of reputation chief among them. By providing customizable error reports and warnings, RoboLive® empowers staff to address quality issues before they reach consumers: issues like missing welds, off-location processing, and bad base frames are all easily detected and identified though RoboLive®’s Process Visualization module.
As a completely new software solution, RoboLive® has to be seen to be believed. That’s why we’re offering free live demonstrations and answer sessions with our engineers, for your entire team or department. Reach out today for scheduling information, and follow RoboLive® on LinkedIn for latest updates.