Eliminate Seven Wastes From Your Quality Processes With Mobility For Leaner, More Efficient Operations

By Motorola

While lean principles are well recognized and practiced on the production line to eliminate waste and cost, rarely are these same principles applied to quality operations. But the same lean best practices utilized to streamline manufacturing processes can also be leveraged to identify and eliminate wastes in order to streamline and error-proof the quality process.

The first step is identifying the areas of waste in the quality function — areas where a significant amount of time is spent on non-value add activities. Just as there are seven well-recognized areas of waste in manufacturing, we have also identified seven areas of waste in quality:

• Manual 'double-touch' of data: gathering information via handwritten forms which must then be entered into the computer at a later date
• Manual research due to lack of real-time data
• Manual consolidation of information from different sources for reporting and trend analysis — for example, data resident in computer applications and also on spreadsheets, databases and contact lists on individual computers
• Lack of access to, or time spent traveling to and from computers and other resources to monitor processes or take required actions
• Managing data errors — identifying, researching and correcting erroneous information
• Heavy staffing requirements due to time intensive manual procedures
• Lack of centralized data repository translates into the need for large amounts of email and high volumes of meetings to obtain data