Understanding wasted time in quality processes (or why it took so long to complete that CAPA)

Let’s deep dive into one non-conformance from the food industry

Here’s the background. It’s a real case we studied from Lakshman’s food processing company. There are about 20 similar non-conformances at this company every single month.

This part is a bit technical – but it doesn’t really matter so much if you follow exactly.

So, wheat flour is a key raw material in this process. The supplier (let’s call them ACME Corp) sends a shipment in big-bags (really big bags of flour – you don’t want to be lifting these by hand). The shipment is brought into the raw material warehouse and cleared by QC for production – because they’re running out. But, on the ACME test certificate, it turns out that the ash content is too high (2.0% vs. 1.4% spec).

What happens next? The extruder, the big machine that cooks the flour, gets jammed. The production head asks the quality department to check the raw material specs. Sure enough, they discover the problem – the wheat flour ash content is out-of-spec.

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Now the quality process kicks in

A supplier non-conformance is created. Due to the huge production delay, the operations head insists that it needs to be root-caused, and CAPAs completed.

Unfortunately, the pressure is on the quality department to solve the problem and get it executed ASAP. Despite all good intentions, this NC takes 5 months to be root-caused and CAPAs executed.

It turns out that there were two problems at the core here – 1) the incoming QC cleared this shipment for production without checking the specs, 2) The supplier, ACME corp, was supplying against an old specification that had been revised 2 months ago.

These root causes lead to 4 CAPAs – (1) change the incoming raw material inspection processes, (2) Train the QC personnel on the new process, (3) Change the way specs are handed over to suppliers, (4) Change the process for suppliers to self certify their products.

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That’s the summary – but where does the time get wasted

Here’s a lean takt time analysis I conducted. VA stands for value addition (or stuff your customer cares about). NVA is non-value addition (stuff you might have to do but your customer doesn’t care about).

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It is obvious that there are a lot of steps involved. A lot of teams coming together, and using multiple tools. Apart from the usual ‘, I dropped the ball’ delays, there are other legitimate reasons for the time wastage.

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So what does that snapshot of time wastage look like?

By diving into all the emails, meeting notes, excel sheets, interviews, etc, we were able to approximate where the time got spent into these buckets:

It’s interesting to note that we classified the wasted time into the 8 wastes of Lean. And what it ultimately boils down to is that ~85% of the cycle time is non-value addition time. Your customer’s not paying for it.

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So what is the solution? How do I become more efficient?

1. First, start measuring cycle times. Even if you can’t get the details in-between, getting the cycle times will ultimately help you reduce it.
2. Create a place where your teams can collaborate on one issue at a time. Multiple emails, systems, excel sheets and meetings add to the chaos. Asynchronous collaboration saves incredible amounts of time.
3. Deep dive into one process end-to-end. If you can do this once a month, it will help, if not aim for once a quarter.
4. Identify weak spots in your process. Look for lack of ownership, excessive data transfer, unaccounted delays, long meeting cadences, high friction tasks, and silos.
5. Continuously improve your processes.
6. Shoot for the moon – if a process takes 6 months, ask your team why it can’t be done in 6 days. If they aren’t thinking outside the box, they won’t make much progress.

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