Quality Inspection and Expediting
Business sector: Engineering industry
To ensure high quality standards and prevent costly breakdown time resulting in delays in delivery, our customer relies on a complex set of material testing procedures such as expediting and supplier site inspections, which are partly carried out by their internal staff and partly outsourced to 3rd-party inspection agencies.
Challenges
The way our customer used to handle expediting and quality inspection was admittedly outdated, nonautomated and totally disconnected from the ERP SAP system, which is utilized for production scheduling and for the integrated management of incoming materials. Failure to standardise the inspection process sometimes rendered inspections unserviceable because dispatching the data collected used to be time-consuming, and taking real-time corrective action to address issues turned out to be impossible.
- Activity coordination failures and poor information sharing.. Coordinating and assigning inspections to field staff required an enormous amount of effort and relied too heavily on emails to exchange information and documents.
- Issuing inspection reports used to be time-consuming. Forwarding information and taking corrective action quickly is critical when it comes to issuing inspection reports, and that’s where our customer used to run into bottlenecks. Issuing inspection reports used to be time-consuming; compiling reports manually occasioned errors and omissions; calling out and arranging the bulk of visual media relating to inspections proved to be problematic; annotated loose sheets, nonautomated forms and occasionally misplaced spreadsheets made for very poor standardization.
- Delays in sharing vital information.. It was virtually impossible to issue and deploy a report within minutes of the equipment inspection, and that undermined the overall quality of the audit itself, as it made it impossible to seek compensation for late delivery from suppliers.
- Difficulties in calling out and checking reports and documents.Failure to share a repository for documents resulted in delays and difficulties during the check phase and in poor standardization of deployed forms by inspection professionals.
Soluzione
Solution
Our customer finally settled on Orangedev to work out an agreed solution to enhance functionality and to take a new approach towards streamlining the reporting procedure for supplier evaluation and expediting.
- First and foremost, we have devised report forms to our customer’s specifications, which has brought about better standardization and formalization practices in inspection reporting procedures, independently of whether inspections are performed by internal staff or by 3rd-party agencies.
- Integration with SAP has been implemented to automatically generate daily inspection report forms showing priority of checklist items according to daily inspection schedules.
- The implementation of InspectionSite app has allowed inspectors to access report forms from any mobile device and to complete them during the inspection.
- Compiling a report form using the app is easy and intuitive, and makes data collection free from errors and omissions.
- Inspection techs put in data and capture photos or video auto associated to inspected items. Each photo is unambiguously flagged, date/time stamped and item-coded by the system. In addition, users can attach any kind of file to their reports in real time and in a systematic way.
- InspectionSite helps you deal with non-compliance issues and punch list items, responding quickly to situations as they occur.
- Once your reports are compiled and digitally signed off, share them in real time with your back-end staff. Eliminate the circulation of hard copy printouts for sign-off.
- Expediting and inspection managers dispatch reports quickly to field techs through the system, and can rely on a state-of-the-art storage system for inspection reports, as they are sorted by type, date and supplier, thus speeding up the recovery of a report for future reference.
Final results
Field staff and managing team are extremely satisfied with InspectionSite, as it has significantly streamlined the procedure for supplier inspection reports.
- Inspection visits can be automatically coordinated and assigned to field techs through the system in a matter of minutes, thus putting an end to back-and-forth emails.
- Virtually concurrent with each inspection is the compilation of an inspection report; a 75% time reduction has been observed in drawing up and submitting a report, thus enabling our customer to seek prompt compensation for late delivery from suppliers.
- What’s more, streamlining the procedure for inspection reports has boosted the qualitative aspect of the inspection process, enabling field techs to devote more time to inspections and checks and ensuring the creation of thorough and orderly reports that back-end staff can easily make out.
Overall, significant improvement in time management as well as in expediting and inspection cost-effectiveness has been witnessed.
Key features
PhotoMark
Sorting and identifying pictures acquired during the inspection, quickly and without pairing mistakes. It is possible to mark each media with information, such as: article code, site name, date and time, GPS coordinates.
Sign
Inspector can upload and save his own signature from the APP or sign directly by the device touchscreen, allowing automatic creation of already signed reports, even in multiple positions or pages. It is also possible to acquire multiple signatures, in case reports need to be signed by various inspectors.
Compliance
It allows you to manage non-conformities in a simple way according to customizable criteria. You can easily see which inspections or individual items are non-compliant and track non-compliances even after their resolution.
Report
Report templates are totally customized according to your needs. Also large-sized and containing hundreds of photos output reports are managed and available in PDF, Word, Excel.
BigMedia
Storage of data and photos in original size without taking up space of company devices or storage. You can easily share them with customers/back o ce or download them on local devices.
Import
Allows you to import data related to inspections to be carried out, in order to create reports with pre-filled information.
Mailer
Automatic mails to send copies of reports and/or media to customers or other recipients at the same time.