How We Help Our Customers Get the Best Possible Castings, Extrusions and Machined Parts

“Our manufacturing supplier cannot deliver zero-defect quality.” This is something we at MES often hear during our meetings with prospective new customers. It’s also one of the biggest obstacles some lighting, transportation, and EV companies have in sourcing their own manufacturing suppliers.

But, to stay competitive in a global economy, zero-defect manufactured parts and components are essential.

It’s also one of the main reasons we require our worldwide network of suppliers and our own MES quality engineers to participate in exacting and rigorous annual training on our Statistical Process Control (SPC) methodology.

What is SPC?

The American Society for Quality (ASQ) defines SPC as a means to “monitor process behavior, discover issues in internal systems, and find solutions for production issues”¹

Put more simply, SPC is how MES helps ensure defect-free quality. For us, SPC is both a principal and a tool. With SPC, our quality engineers and vetted suppliers can more accurately monitor process performance, confirm process improvement, as well as identify common and special cause variations.

Our Director of Global Quality/Project, Khayphone Chindasack puts it this way:

“SPC is a quality-focused, data-driven methodology designed to prevent defects before mass production. We use it as an empowerment tool to help our suppliers compare and align their current processes with our best-in-class quality standards.”

Why Statistical Process Control?

Perhaps you’re wondering why SPC is our process and tool of choice. The best way we can explain it is to look at an industry outside of manufacturing that most of us are familiar with—real estate. In real estate, there’s an adage that says there are three things that matter when it comes to purchasing a property. And they are location, location, location.

The same can be said of manufacturing. What matters most with aluminum, titanium, plastic, and rubber manufactured parts is quality, quality, quality.

This is where the significance of SPC becomes clear. Thanks to this process, our suppliers are essentially doing a pre-emptive strike to prevent costly and wasteful defects. This carefully constructed mathematical process lets them identify—and remedy—potential failure rates long before parts start coming off the production line.

“The goal of SPC is to eliminate all disturbances in a process, to reduce variation, and to produce on target, which then leads to continual process improvement,” says MES Senior Manager of Quality Control Prakash Subramanian. “With SPC, errors in the process, such as tool wear, incorrect adjustments, wrong materials, etc. are found at an early stage thus enabling production with less variation and greater reduction in scrap levels.”

The end result of SPC is what both we and our customers demand: delivery of zero-defect parts and components.

The SPC Process: Universal Yet Unique

Unlike some of our solutions, like MESH Works, the SPC process in and of itself is not proprietary. In fact, the SPC process is a lot like real estate in another way, too. Both employ a general framework within their respective industries; however, each determines its own parameters, controls, and limits in the application of the framework.

Here at MES, our SPC process is one of five core quality tools that we’ve customized, proven, and refined to better ensure:

• Customer satisfaction
• Manufacturing efficiency
• Predictable and consistent production of specification-conforming products
• Less waste, including scrap and costly rework
• Elimination or reduction of customer quality inspection

SPC Training Goals & Outcomes

While our SPC is specific to our commitment to delivering precision manufactured parts and components, the truth is that it’s simply not enough to have the process. We must also be diligent and systematic in equipping our suppliers to understand, apply, and adhere to our SPC so that, together, MES delivers best-in-class manufactured parts to customers all over the globe.

Recently, we took our Metrics Mexico machining, die casting, and extrusions suppliers, as well as our Mexico-based MES supplier quality engineer through a half-day, hands-on SPC training session.

Here’s an overview of what our SPC training participants learned how to:

• Apply the concepts, terminology, and purpose of SPC to their operations
• Operationalize MES SPC requirements for the automotive sector
• Use control charts to manage capabilities and forecast capacity
• Interpret SPC study results and apply insights for continuous improvement
• Identify variations in manufacturing, including patterns and measures of variations

“Participants gained a thorough working knowledge of how and why SPC works, along with a deeper understanding of how to apply MES’s SPC principles and practices,” says Prakash. “They learned how to correctly apply SPC to achieve process stability and already are implementing it on their shop floors to minimize process variations and achieve zero-defect production.”

3 Reasons Why SPC Training Is Important

1. Bad parts are costly. Without a rigorous quality process in place, there are bound to be variations in components; variations that can lead to inconsistent and poor quality (aka unusable) parts. Not only are defective parts a waste of raw materials, but they’re also a drain of time and money.
2. Quality processes ensure more efficient production. Keeping the production line moving is crucial to keeping up with timelines and meeting increasing customer demand. A lot of factors, ranging from materials to labor to equipment, impact the efficiency of the production line, but none more so than implementing a standardized process like SPC. SPC helps take the guesswork out of the quality process, while also reducing human error and production slowdowns.
3. Trained suppliers are equipped to meet higher standards. Among the many ways to develop competency, training ranks at or near the very top. In fact, research shows that training suppliers helps them connect the dots between the work they do, and the impact defects, setbacks, and delays have on the end customer.² Training suppliers is one key to how we manage the quality control process and ensure successful manufacturing.

Improving Continuous Improvement

 Our customers have high expectations—and so do we. The only way we can reliably deliver precise, accurate, manufactured-to-spec parts and components is by empowering our manufacturers, die casters, and machinists to produce to our exacting standards.

For MES, training is not just a “nice to have.” It’s imperative to the way we do business and the MES Quality Difference.

At MES, there’s no room for error. So, we equip our global suppliers with the processes, methodologies, and tools they need to deliver with precision. And we reinforce this with an actual, in-country, boots-on-the-ground quality engineer for each and every supplier.

To learn more about our SPC quality process and supplier training, or to find out how we can help you improve product quality, reduce costs, and eliminate waste, contact us.

References

1. org. “What is Statistical Process Control?” https://asq.org/quality-resources/statistical-process-control. Retrieved 5 December 2022.
2. com. “Quantifying the Benefits of Quality: Employee training and Incentives.” https://www.industryweek.com/operations/quality/article/21995481/quantifying-the-benefits-of-quality-employee-training-and-incentives. Retrieved 5 December 2022.