If you are involved in quality and operations decisions for manufacturing or supply-chain management, one of your most important responsibilities is to ensure that the final output of your plant is in compliance with internal and external quality standards.
This is not as easy as it sounds. There are many variables in this process to consider: Are the suppliers delivering you good quality raw materials? Is your process set up to consistently manufacture superior quality products? Are you understanding customer feedback/complaints and ensuring a closed-loop process by providing information back to the design group? Now consider this for multiple products and multiple production lines.
The five metrics below will help to showcase the current performance of quality in your plant, highlighting successes, gaps, and areas for improvement.
Metric 1: Yield
Yield is a metric traditionally measured by most organizations. Companies generally measure first pass and overall yield, as both metrics provide insights into the effectiveness of your quality management process.
First Pass Yield can be measured as the percentage of products produced that meet both quality and compliance standards without the need of re-run or re-work. A simplified definition of first pass yield is the number of units coming out of a process divided by the number of units going into that process over a specified period of time.
Overall Yield measures the percentage of products produced that may or may not require re-run or re-work to be within compliance and quality standards.