We had been facing a moderate number of mistakes during our manufacturing process. Depending upon the stage at which the mistake was caught we had to spend ‘x’ amount of hours to rectify it.
Quite often this meant going back to the drawing board. This also meant stalling of our other components until the problem was sorted out. This caused a huge burden in our production process. Over time we had something drilled into our brains, The Cost Of Rectifying Mistakes!
Our process is divided into multiple stages
- Design - The initial drawings are made and submitted for customer approval. The draftsman might spend anything between a few hours to an entire day on the drawing.
- Procurement - This stage involves interacting with various suppliers, gathering of quotes and finally ordering for material.
- Machining - The material is let out to subcontractors and machined at their premises. The costs are pretty direct going forward as the cost is a direct function of their wage rate.
- Production - The job will go through a small set of processes including drilling, suiting etc. The costs are again a direct function of our wage rate. { Our wage rate > Their wage rate; refer 3 & 4 }
- Assembly - The assembly fitters are paid the highest of the lot (excluding Design). They will assemble the components and test it to become a full fledged cylinder.
Normally each of the stages takes about a week for a moderately sized product ( We build a wide range of the same product ).
We found ( common sense really ) that the cost of rectification escalated as it advanced over different stages. This gives us a strong reason to NOT to commit mistakes. The idea of mistakes alone is long enough to warrant another post.
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