Improving the Quality Rate - Case Study

As a key market-leading organisation in the Aerospace and Defence industry, this Tier One supplier to the world’s most successful commercial airline is measured and managed by its on-time delivery, and rejections from its customer production line. This supplier specialises in control systems and has a small specific product range. It is vital that this company meets its commitments. So when the company needed a supportive partner to achieve and maintain a commitment rate, Succinct Solutions offered its proven business model to discover their potential and resolve the problems stopping the company achieving their goals.

The Problem
The company had a well established product range, cementing the corner-stone of their business for many years. Since the implementation of a complete measure package by the customer, the business ‘cash cow’ has suffered producing a poor rejection rate; and no process to improve or understand how this rejection rate transpired had been enforced.

The company was being measured externally and this was highlighting a problem, but with little or no measure analysis internally, the business was not able to improve this measure. The business was faced with a classic dilemma; having a consistent problem, but not knowing what the problem was or what the customer wanted.
The predicament faced was to identify and understand the problem, and then to discover a solution.

Succinct Solutions took the business through a Situation Stage to understand the problem according to their business. Succinct Solutions then conducted an analysis of the business proper and performed a benchmark exercise to understand the problem, and uncover the driving force behind its failure. The analysis concluded that the company was a factor of 10 off the projected target, and only one product with a few quality problems was solely driving this data. The customer expected a rejection rate of 0.8% but the actual figure was an unacceptable 10%. The performance of their product compared with other manufacturers on the same platform was showing a substantial opportunity for improvement. Key Performance Indicators (KPI) were actioned to immediately capture the current rejection rate and main driver contributing to this rate.
Put succinctly, the business was out of control and the customer was not receiving a quality product that they needed to maintain build rates.

The Solution
To solve the problem Succinct Solutions conducted a full review of the business to uncover the drivers behind these top-level rejection figures. This provided a full understanding of the problem. Once all the problem was fully defined through the Situation, Analysis and Benchmarking Succinct Solutions highlighted a number of opportunities for improvement. Once the business and Succinct Solutions had agreed on the areas that needed to be improved, Succinct Solutions provided multiple options with different timescales for each area. Due to the nature of the problem; resolution of one improvement would not return an acceptable solution to solve the problem, so a multiple of solutions were required. The business decided on a low cost, no cost solution over a long implementation process. As the customer required this rejection rate to be reduced quickly, all areas of improvement were tackled consecutively with as much concurrent activity as possible. The low cost model involved utilised the knowledge and equipment in-house to optimise the process and improve the quality baseline of the product.

Succinct Solutions implemented resolutions for the business including improved testing profiles; increasing the testing that the product went through to be more realistic to the conditions seen in aircraft platforms, in terms of electrical, mechanical and environmental.
An 8D process was introduced within the supply chain ensuring a standard model to measure all problems. This meant that every issue had an identified root cause and was driven to be contained, have a corrective action in place to fix the problem and a preventive action to ensure that the problem did not reoccur. We also vitally worked with the end-customers processes to identify and implement ways to reduce the rejection rate for products, returned regardless that no fault had been found.

Bottom Line Results
Succinct Solutions provided a full work package to understand the problem and provide implemented solutions. The results of this project were above and beyond the goals set at the start. The business achieved the vital resolution to decrease the rejection rate from an unacceptable 10%, to the customer’s goal of 0.8%. A goal achieved four months ahead of plan.
Part of the process to achieve this provided the business with other key achievements, these included; an improved testing process for all its products to benefit from, placing the business back in control of its product quality rate. The business has an industry recognised process to manage and resolve quality problems in the 8D model. And more significantly it has worked with its customers to remove falsely rejected products returned in the first place.