Is your inspection management process delivering value?
Establishing criteria for evaluating your process outcome allows you to ensure optimal productivity by clearly defining appropriate requirements. This also enables you to achieve strategic objectives, satisfy customers’ expectations, manage quality effectively, improve processes and maintain good relationships with suppliers.
After communicating your targets, you can also lead your team to excel, by assessing them regularly to ensure their contribution meets the goal.
Certainly, there are a number of different metrics that can be used when it comes to tracking how processes are doing, and the most effective ones will depend on your business and on the different people involved and their roles. Here are five metrics for measuring inspection process performance.
Performance Metric #1: Delays
First, it’s important to monitor delays which occur during the execution of activities to ensure the delivery date agreed with your customer is met.
Although a delay doesn’t always mean a problem, often when a delay is found, a cost for the organizations (yours, your customer or supplier) will affect the project. These costs, especially if they are not properly recorded, aren’t accounted on the project and therefore contribute to the “hidden costs”.
Quality of the product and the reliability of the company affect directly the reputation of a company. The importance of the company’s ability to deliver in a timely manner in a cost effective way cannot be understated
Performance Metric #2: Extra cost for re-works
It could happened you need to repair or rework your product, due to an incorrect manufacturing activity, a wrong specification or a not updated drawing / procedure; It’s hard to believe that a rework doesn’t mean additional costs and/or delays on the planned activities. These costs must be tracked to monitor them properly, to keep them under control and put in place relevant actions to improve your process.
Performance Metric #3: Additional resources
Every project has a budgeted amount of resources. Any over-utilization has an impact on the project’s profitability. Sometime if you don’t want to incur delays, it may be necessary to deploy additional resources to the project and this of course leads to extra cost.
Performance Metric #4: Non-conformance from customers
Additional costs related to complaints or NCRs from your customers can be significant not only in terms of economic cost but also damage to the reputation of your company in the eyes of your customer.
Performance Metric #5: Economic penalties
Penalty payment inflicted by clients for both quality issues and late deliveries, represent a pure costs for the company. Especially when they are issued late when goods have already been shipped, they must be taken into consideration because they affect the bottom line of your balance sheet.
Conclusion:
Without measuring, you cannot change or improve anything. You cannot determine results of your effort since you do not know your baseline.
In addition to the quality of your product, avoiding delays and additional costs on your project, it means you are delivering value to your customer and furthermore it is good to increase your company’s profile and therefore profit margin.
Finally, implementing project management metrics can build historical data to help improving future planning, and allow for comparisons.
