【120】From a 0.5% return rate to 0.05%: The miracle created by the detection system

【120】From a 0.5% return rate to 0.05%: The miracle created by the detection system

The quality director of a multinational enterprise in Shanghai came to Dongguan specially last week. It wasn't for auditing, but for learning - their annual purchase volume of injection molded parts exceeds 100 million yuan, but the average return rate is around 0.5%, while the products delivered by Fuying have zero return rate for consecutive 18 months.

"I would like to know," he began directly in the meeting room, "how did you manage to do it? With the same equipment and the same raw materials, why is there such a big difference?"

I didn't give a direct answer. Instead, I led him on a special route: starting from the raw material warehouse, passing through the production workshop, and finally arriving at the finished product warehouse. The entire journey was 1.2 kilometers. We passed through twenty-three inspection points, of which twelve were full inspection points and eleven were sampling inspection points. At each point, I asked him to randomly select the inspection records for viewing.

At the raw material inspection point, he saw the "health check reports" for each batch of raw materials: in addition to the regular items, there were also DSC thermal analysis, FTIR infrared spectroscopy, ash content, and even the traceability of the production batch number of the raw material producers. At the first-piece inspection station, he saw that the operators did not randomly inspect three pieces, but instead continuously inspected thirty pieces until the data was stable before allowing production to proceed. In the full inspection area of the finished products, he discovered that the types of products we fully inspected were much more than he had imagined.

"How many people will be needed for these tests?" he asked.

"There are 68 direct quality inspectors, accounting for 18% of the total production staff," I said. "The annual investment in testing equipment accounts for 3.5% of the revenue."

He quickly did the calculation mentally: "This represents a 40% higher cost than the industry average."

"But our customer claim costs are 5% of the industry average," I pulled up the financial data. "And because of the stable quality, we have seven customers who have granted us exemption from inspection. Their inspection personnel have withdrawn from us - the cost savings from this are enough to support three quality inspection teams."

The most crucial difference lies in the way of thinking. Many enterprises view testing as a means to "screen out defective products", while we consider testing as a tool to "prevent the occurrence of defective products". The data collected at each testing point will be uploaded to the system in real time. Once there is an abnormal trend, the system will issue an alert before a large number of defective products appear. Last month, the X-ray testing machine detected a trend of an increase in tiny bubbles inside a batch of products. Although each product was qualified individually, we still stopped production for investigation and found that there was a slight blockage in the exhaust holes of the mold. If this problem had not been discovered, large areas of bubbles would have appeared in the products produced three days later.

"Rather than conducting a test, you are actually making a quality prediction," the director remarked with a sigh.

What touched him the most was the scene in the finished product warehouse. Before shipment, the quality inspectors would conduct a final "packaging inspection" on the products to be loaded onto the vehicles - not checking the products themselves, but the packaging method, protective measures, and the accuracy of the labels. This seemingly unnecessary step once prevented a major customer complaint: A batch of export products, due to improper packaging, got damp and deformed during shipping. Since adding this inspection, such problems have never occurred again.

At the time of parting, the director said, "I originally thought you had some magical technology. But it turns out that you have achieved perfection in every basic step." He was right. There is no shortcut to quality. It's just that where others think it's "good enough", we choose to do it "not even a little bit worse".

On the path of quality, we have chosen the most straightforward approach - the Golden Eagle full-process inspection system, which relies on data to convey the message.