The quality of the design and documentation produced has a major influence on the overall performance and efficiency of production projects. Designers provide the basic blueprints for representing the ideas and concepts that manufacturers need to make products a reality. However, it is the quality of the documentation provided which determines how effective and efficient turn around time is for production. Inadequate and deficient design and documentation impacts the production process efficiency by leading to delays, rework and variations, contributing to increases in project time and cost. But, there are levels before manufacturing can happen that can delay this process, or even bring production to a halt.
There are a countless number of documentation used throughout every company. They can range from quality assurance to manufacturing. Without running through a complete list of all the documentation that a company would use, we will instead sum the documentation into several categories below.
Lets take a look at each of these categories and see the effects of poor documentation and how it can cost time and money.
Focusing on the business is a primary function of management and keeping track of everything is a chore that can fluster even the best. Properly documenting every transaction, who's in charge or which assignments, and scheduling deadlines are vital to running a productive enterprise.
With any business, financial transactions from deposits to supplies are conducted. Keeping a clear and properly documented record of receipts, invoices, and charges is important to for business expense and income reports. Last thing anyone wants to do is shuffle around and search for item expense receipts that have gone missing. For larger companies management is moving through income and expense at an accelerated rate. Having a well-developed documenting system would save time and trouble later on.
Time away from the team and to gather paperwork can lead to failure, if not conducted properly. Time away from the team, actually means that management is not dedicating themselves to their leadership tasks. And worse if they actually get to the point where tracking down documentation is stealing time away from other crucial duties things can get worse with approaching deadlines.
Quality assurance is a means of preventing mistakes, or defects in manufactured products, and avoiding problems when delivering products or services to customers. QA is applied to physically completed pre-production to verify that the product meets specifications and requirements, and during manufacturing production runs by validating a portion of samples and that they meet specific quality control. QA plays a critical role in high volume documented projects and ensures that standards are met while cost and time constraints are reached, or improved.
Much of the required quality is dictated by the client or the design specifications given to the engineer. Proper documentation is necessary to adhere to these specification. If the samples selected are evaluated based on criteria that is incorrectly stated in the product specification document, then validation of the sample would be based on incorrect information.
Quality assurance is the last step before production is given the go ahead for a production batch. What happens if the documents are incorrect and validation was completed based on incorrect specification?
At this point the QA employee is only verifying that the product meets or exceeds the targeted specification. If the information was incorrectly inputted into the design sheet, then the QA employee would wave the batch through as it meets the stated specifications.
What happens once the product reaches market and turns out that it did not actually conform to regulatory standards? This is especially bad for companies that manufacture products that can directly, or indirectly involve public safety. In a lesser case scenario the company would realize the mistake and recall the order before any immediate casualties. But, there is quite often the mistake that human casualties result making a simple documentation mistake into a company crisis.
Recalls that are implemented before disaster often only need to replace the part with the validated component. But, in the worst case scenario the part resulted in someones death and now replacing the component would be the least of the companies worries.
Quality assurance is the final step before products can reach to market, and if validation is not correct the consequences could be tremendous. This is the final stage that can account for human error along the way from design to manufacturing to verify product standards and specifications.
The design and engineering of projects is a complex and challenging process, and its success is heavily reliant upon good communication between members of the design and engineering teams. Good design is effective when it serves its intended purpose and is produced within a desired budget, time constraints, and safely. To effectively communicate the design to manufacturing personnel requires a document to clearly define in great detail in the matter of producing it, effectively and without hindrance.
The communication of the current design documentation, for example consists typically of a 2D or 3D generated drawing, showing the physically structure, along with specifications showing production and installation process. Issues arise when the following happens:
This is a result of either poor documentation or an engineering’s understanding of manufacturing facility capabilities. When issues like this arise, reworking is usually done to rectify the issue. Reworking design drawing and incomplete specifications might not take too terribly long, but each day reworking is better than having someone use the documentation of an iterated project and have them run into similar, or worse, issues. Either way reworking production and assembly procedures results in time delayed for product to reach market, and can affect total production cost.
Having the proper documentation is essential from the beginning. Developing better practices to catch these mistakes early on will save time and money later on.
Fabrication is where design and engineering reached a manufacturability point. The product has been designed to client specification and is ready for development. Manufacturing requires significant information before they can start fabrication. Usually they will need documents including the drawing specification, manufacturability methods, and the stated tolerancing requirements that the fabricators need to adhere too.
Manufacturing documentation needs to convey the information and design from the engineers to the manufacturing employees completely, without having them ask too many question about the design. If the information is not conveyed accurately the product could be developed with wrong dimensions, out of toleranced parts, and producing a component that does not comply with current standards and regulations.
Equipment documentation and validation for manufacturing equipment is necessary to reassure the client of the companies dedication to high quality products. If testing or manufacturing equipment has not been verified by certified calibration companies and still be used for production could result in poor results or incorrect fabrication. Calibration companies should always be chosen as those that produced the equipment or are accredited, instead of having a third party verify it with documents that might not even be up-to-date.
Either way the documentation is essential for completing product precisely, effectively, and with high quality. A batch of manufactured parts that do not comply with standards will require reworking. And understanding if this is an issues with design/engineering documentation or equipment certification can require time away from the project, resulting in downtime until solutions can be determined, costing more money and more time.
Overall, documentation is designed to be a means of communicating information between peers and workers. They provide valuable information that can answer countless questions for others to complete their work. Documentation is important to keep up-to-date, consistent, and complete. Documents that are not coherent affect production efficiency and turnaround time completion. Poor documentation can result in the following:
These matters can come from poor management or engineering documentation and cause issues like:
Either way you look at it the importance of proper documentation is important. The examples provided in this article are an over-generalization of the actually documentation used in every company. It is just there to show you the importance that documents have and how the affects can trickle down and cause serious downtime, or financial burden on any company.