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Epicor Enhanced Quality Assurance
Don Agostino • June 17, 2020
Epicor Enhanced Quality Assurance
A Potent Weapon in the War on Defects
Producing and shipping high quality products at a reasonable price is the only way a manufacturer can remain in business. Gone are the days of “good enough” or “we compete on price, not quality”, manufacturers are being held to increasingly higher standards of quality by their competitors. Much of the credit for this goes to W. Edwards Deming, often regarded as the “father of Statistical Quality Control” based mainly on his early work in postwar Japan and who was widely regarded as a hero in Japan for his emphasis on statistics as a tool for improving quality in manufacturing. Statistical Quality Control (SQC) and Statistical Process Control (SPC) are the lifeblood of a manufacturing company that seeks to measure and capture data about their products and to monitor the production process to ensure high quality standards.
Costs of Quality
Deming and others showed that the cost of inferior quality could be measured, giving management an opportunity to evaluate their quality programs in dollar terms. These costs fall into two categories:
- Inspection costs, which are easily measured, as the cost of human and machine resources to inspect products during the manufacturing process.
- Defect costs, some of which are also easily measured, such as the cost of reworking a defective part or the accumulated cost on a scrapped part. However, there are defect costs that are not easily measured, such as the cost of a late shipment and / or the cost of a lost customer.
Because of the impact of the defect costs there is no “optimal” solution in terms of minimizing costs, the ones that can’t be directly measured will overwhelm the ones that can. However, management can use the information from the measurable costs to evaluate its quality program not with an eye toward cost minimization but output maximization.
An Effective Quality Program
It’s not enough to know that a manufacturing process creates defective parts, or even how many are being created. The real knowledge comes in the determination of why the defects occur, and for this it is necessary to capture process information such as diameter, thickness, tensile strength, etc. This is where the Epicor Enhanced Quality Management (EQA) module comes in. With this module manufacturers are able to create inspection plans for receiving or in-process inspection, and calibration plans for machinery. An inspection plan will:
- Define attributes to store measurements and to establish pass / fail criteria. These criteria can be local to an inspection plan or global.
- Create specifications and attach documents to the specification for further details as needed. A Specification controls the inspection attributes that are evaluated against the specification and defines the acceptable values for each attribute. You will assign a revision to a specification to controls its effectivity date.
- Set equipment calibration criteria.
- Use revision control to create multiple revisions of a plan and approve the revisions as appropriate.
- Determine sample sizes.
- Set inspection intervals using Skip Lot processing.
- Store the collected data in database tables available for export to a SPC system and / or a Business Activity Query report or dashboard.
Because all of the above are user-defined, the Epicor Enhanced Quality module can be used by any manufacturer.
Setting Up Inspection Plans
The EQA module uses the Epicor Product Configurator as the base for data collection, although a license for the Configurator module is not required. An Inspection Plan is revision-controlled and may be used with multiple specifications.
The process is as follows:
- Define the attributes for the data you wish to collect – what is it you want to measure?
- Create the specifications and assign the attributes.
- For each attribute, define any parameters and pass / fail values, as appropriate. These can be done in the specification or in the Inspection Plan itself.
- Finally, pull all of this together into an Inspection Plan or Calibration Plan. Launch the Product Configurator and bring in the specification and attributes needed in the plan.
Once the Inspection Plan has been created and approved it can be assigned to a part (for receiving inspection or RMA Processing) or to an operation for in-process inspection.
Using an Inspection Plan
In the Inspection Process program in the Epicor Quality Assurance module for a purchase order receipt, the program will recognize when the purchased part has an approved inspection plan and will enable the data collection process. This will start with choosing a sample size; the Product Configurator at this point generates the number of inspection instances to match the sample size and displays the Attributes screens to collect the data.
In a similar fashion, Epicor recognizes when an inspection plan has been assigned to an operation and will provide the same functionality. In both cases the process generates a Nonconformance for any parts that fail inspection. Inspection personnel can use the Nonconformance to create a Corrective Action as needed.
Likewise, the collected data can be exported using a Business Activity Query into a BAQ Report or dashboard to display statistics by part and attribute, such as Mean and Standard Deviation, and to create an X-bar Control Chart to display sample statistics for process control purposes. Crystal Reports is an excellent tool to display the control chart.
Skip Lot Processing
One of the more robust features of the Enhanced Quality Assurance module is the ability to determine the inspection interval for a purchased part to allow receipts of the part to bypass receiving inspection based on past quality results. This is done by defining a Skip Lot Code, which specifies the number of lots to be inspected, the number of lots to be skipped between inspections, and the repeat cycle. Users will define multiple skip lot codes to be used based on inspection results.
For example, a user may decide to inspect two lots of a part and then skip the next three lots if the first two pass inspection, and to repeat this process for a total of three cycles. If the supplier delivers lots that pass inspection for all of the cycles, then Epicor will automatically change the inspection occurrences to another Skip Lot Code that the user has assigned, such as skipping eight lots and inspecting two. If any lots fail inspection then Epicor will likewise assign a different Skip Lot Code for more intensive inspection.
So, What Can I Expect from EQA?
You cannot expect to build and ship high quality parts without knowledge of your manufacturing processes, and EQA provides this knowledge regarding the incidence of defects and where these defects are occurring. As you may have inferred from the above, this module requires a large amount of setup to define the inspection attributes and then use them in specifications and inspection plans. EQA provides a means of gathering production data and storing the data in a format readily available for analysis through SPC software or user-written reports and dashboards, allowing you to see what is going on in your shop floor.
By now most, if not all, of you have heard of the Epicor Product Configurator and some of you may be very familiar with it. For those of you who are not that familiar with the Configurator here is a brief list of things that it can do: Automate the part configuration, engineering, or quoting process. This is crucial during the sales process to ensure the customers get what they need. Generate “intelligent” part numbers and descriptions. These can be catalog part numbers or “one off” parts created for a single quote or sales order. Generate a Bill of Material and Routing to assist in developing product costs. Prevent invalid configurations and combinations of options. The Configurator does this by capturing the knowledge of your engineering and design staff and placing it into the Epicor database, and then applying that knowledge during the sales process.
Not a day goes by in the life of a manufacturing professional that we don’t hear the term Material Requirements Planning, or its more common abbreviation MRP. We are all familiar with the term, and what it means, but how well do we really understand the inner workings of the tool? Before MRP, most manufacturing companies relied on what was referred to as the “order launch and expedite” system, whereby work orders were released to the floor based on upcoming shipments and expediters worked their magic to get the orders done on time. This led to great inefficiencies in material procurement and resource usage, but there didn’t seem to be any other choice.
Scheduling of work orders through a factory is an indispensable part of managing a production facility, yet it is typically the last module of any ERP system that is implemented. The reason why this is true may surprise you, although it’s really not at all surprising. Basically, even though everyone understands the concept of scheduling, applying this concept in a production environment is very difficult. There are all kinds of reasons for this, but perhaps the most important is that people don’t understand what a scheduling module is supposed to do. There are the usual problems: suppliers don’t deliver on time, customers change their delivery dates, excess scrap, and so forth; but I have seen over time that many people do not have a good understanding of job scheduling. Of course, this knowledge will not automatically transform your shop floor into a model of efficiency, but it will at least give you the information you need to make informed decisions.