Quality & Yield Improvement Consulting

Manufacturing and other production-focused businesses commonly experience some degree of defects or waste in their production processes. In those environments where material costs are a significant percentage of the overall cost of goods sold (COGS), the cumulative effect of waste and low yields can have a significant impact on your profitability. That’s where quality management consulting pays off.

Overall Quality and Yield Improvement

The cost of quality in many organizations can be significant. There are costs associated with trying to ensure production processes conform to standard (e.g. design, testing, control) and there are costs associated when they don’t (e.g. equipment breakdowns, rework, service recovery).

Carpedia has over 20 years experience in exposing the root causes of quality/yield issues and helping to implement system and quality process improvements to reduce waste. We deliver quality/yield improvements by working shoulder-to-shoulder with your management team and going beyond just process improvement to include management systems and behavioral change.

Discovery & Analysis

Material yield improvement requires understanding where quality issues or yield loss occurs throughout the production process, which can be elusive and difficult to assess. We begin our process by breaking down your processes into value streams and measuring material loss where it occurs. By developing this value stream model, we are able to isolate and quantify the impact of addressing specific quality/yield issues. This provides a focus for where effort should be invested in the project.

Observation

We work with you to identify the key underlying causes (e.g. product design, raw material procurement, process design, equipment maintenance, process skills) and determine the financial impact. In order to uncover quality/yield issues, our consultants go on the shop floor with your teams, watching and learning by observation and point-of-execution studies. This focused observation allows us to identify breakdowns in existing processes, management systems, and behaviors that are resulting in defects, waste and lower yields.

Implementation

Our quality process improvement takes an integrated team approach, working shoulder-to-shoulder with your management to implement product, process, and skills improvements needed to minimize waste. We then build or refine your management systems to better control the business, and improve the data integrity of information systems to ensure accurate, reliable tracking and reporting to help expose quality issues.

Sustainability

To ensure these improvements are sustainable, our quality improvement consulting provides frontline leaders with the coaching, training, and tools required to improve quality and reinforce the behaviors that produce better yields and less waste. Our emphasis on sustainability—combined with strong metrics and management reporting—helps reinforce your culture of accountability and lead to consistent performance over time.