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When you talk about traceability most people think about record keeping for life-critical products such as bullet-proof glass, fire glass and the like.
But tracking how individual pieces of glass are moving through your factory, and tracing rejects right the way back, is essential data for improving efficiency and quality.
Reducing rejects and breakages
If you can trace failures back to a particular process or machine, you can work on fixing what’s going wrong. It may be that a machine needs additional cleaning or maintenance. Some of your staff may need more supervision or training. Or you may find a process that involves excessive handling or something else that needs addressing.
Identifying faulty materials
When you start looking for the reasons behind internal rejects, the data will sometimes point you to a particular batch of raw materials, or materials from a particular source. You can then look more closely to decide if it is just a coincidence or a problem that you need to take up with the supplier.
The problem with paperwork
Chances are you already have paperwork to record when breakages or other internal rejects occur: perhaps an internal reject log.
But having it on paper makes it really hard to analyse, draw conclusions and make changes. It’s hard to spot patterns when you have to sift through sheets of paper.
And perhaps more importantly, it takes a lot of time to process paperwork. In a busy glass company, putting all your reject reports into a spreadsheet and then manually analysing the data won’t be an urgent priority. And once time has passed, any corrective action becomes a lot less effective.
Electronic tracking and reporting
For many of our customers, the solution come from tracking each piece of glass through the factory and reporting rejects as part of the process.
Every item is given a barcode which is scanned as it goes into and leaves a workstation. If the operator needs to report a reject, they scan the piece of glass as usual but then use the scanner or the Gtrak app to add a reject code.
As well as making the process quick and easy, this approach means that rejects are flagged up immediately and the right people can be notified automatically.
Analysis and improvement
When internal rejects occur, different people need to be told about it in different ways:
Using Gtrak, your production manager will be notified immediately on their dashboard and can directly schedule the remake into production. In addition mechanisms are available such as automatic recut label printing at the appropriate cutting station, as well as being made available for re-optimisation in a feature called “Quick Cut”.
On the other hand, your quality manager is more likely to want detailed statistics and perhaps evidence for quality assurance schemes. Other managers may prefer just the headline figures or have the facility to drill-down and investigate rejects by material, by process or whatever else they want to consider.
Gtrak can also make all of this data available for analysis in Excel or Power BI.
Find out more
If you would like to find out more, please read about barcode tracking or dashboards and reporting in Gtrak. Or get in touch by email or through our website.
