At Deco Products, we understand the importance of quality control processes in manufacturing. With this in mind, our approach revolves around actively seeking and addressing customer feedback. Michele Duwe continues her interview with Jason Madison, our Quality Manager at Deco Products.
In case you missed the previous conversation with Jason Madison here is the link.
Eliciting Customer Feedback
Every year, we solicit feedback from our customers through our sales team. This feedback serves as a report card, allowing us to identify areas for improvement. Additionally, our quality team maintains open lines of communication with our customers’ quality teams. With this direct line of communication, it brings together the right people to discuss any concerns with new shipments.
In the event that our customer reaches out to Deco’s quality team it leads to our quality control processes.
Quality Control Processes: Addressing Quality Challenges
When we discover quality issues, we will go through the standard corrective actions procedures that most manufacturers follow.
The corrective action process includes the emphasis to identify what is in control vs what needs improvements.
Overall, we are looking to find a root cause, eliminate the root cause, and then deliver a response back to our customer.
Once we discover the cause, we will modify our system to prevent this event from happening again.
The ISO Quality Policy
As an ISO 9001-registered company, we recently revamped our quality policy to make it more memorable and actionable. The idea came from Chris Storlie, our CEO. How about a simple quality policy that uses those three letters, I, S, and O.
After brainstorming together, we came up with:
“I am responsible for quality, satisfying the customer, and finding opportunities for improvement.”
This simple yet powerful statement communicates our commitment to quality, customer satisfaction, and continuous improvement.
Custom-Made Inspection Plans
Our quality department relies on custom-made databases and inspection plans tailored to each customer’s part numbers. These plans ensure that we follow standardized processes. While leveraging specialized equipment like optical comparators and pin gauge drawers for precise measurements.
Concluding our Quality Control Processes at Deco
Quality is the backbone of everything we do at Deco Products. By prioritizing customer feedback, quality control processes, and a culture of continuous improvement, we strive to deliver exceptional products that exceed expectations. Our commitment to quality is not just a policy; it is a way of life deeply ingrained in our operations. Partner with us and experience the Deco difference, where quality is never an afterthought but the driving force behind our success.
Die Casting Quality Control - Zinc Products - DECO Products
Michele Duwe
Michele Duwe is the Sales and Marketing Manager with Deco Products. She has eight plus years as a digital marketing manager and over a decade of sales and marketing experience.
Transcript of Interview with Jason Madison, Quality Control Manager
[00:00:00.000] – Michele Duwe
Today, I have with me Jason Madison in our quality control department.
So Jason, what role does our customer feedback play in your quality control process?
[00:00:12.320] – Jason Madison, QA Manager
So the primary thing, we do on an annual basis, elicit feedback from the customers. We want to hear from you. And so we get a report card or we get feedback from them. And really, most of that’s driven through our sales team who’s in contact with the customer.
On the quality side, we’re usually in contact with other quality people, our customers, right? So quality person says, oh, hey, we have this concern.
We’re seeing this new shipment from you, and there’s something different, and we’d like to talk to you about that.
And so that It leads back into our process. So we’ll go through the standard things that most manufacturers do, corrective actions, in order to identify what’s going on, find a root cause, work through that root cause, and then deliver response that says, oh, we needed to make a modification to our system in order to avoid this from happening, this event from happening again. So on the one side, I guess the answer is that our sales team is eliciting information from customers that might be quiet.
And then the quality team is generally already in tune with the ongoing daily needs. If something is coming up in the actual daily production stuff.
[00:01:28.440] – Jason Madison, QA Manager
These are optical comparators, common piece of equipment for most manufacturers who are making small parts. We can put a part on here, and we can take accurate digital measurements, even though it’s a visual inspection machine.
[00:01:40.990] – Michele Duwe
Do you have an example or something that you can discuss with us with a quality challenge that you guys were able to overcome?
[00:01:48.350] – Jason Madison, QA Manager
I can think of a case where we make a small part that had a threaded opening, so we actually tap a hole in the part so the customer can put a bolt in there and tighten it down.
And all of a sudden, one day, a customer contacts us and they said, Well, we’ve got these parts, but they look dirty and the bolts just go right through.
They don’t screw in. They just push right through. So we started investigating further.
Well, what happens to these parts after they leave here?
Well, as it turns out, they didn’t go directly to the customer that was asking us about them.
There’s another process in the middle where they would go to an electroplating process.
And after working with the customer and the electroplater, what was discovered is that the part was literally being eroded away slightly in the electroplating process.
It was making all the surfaces shrink away. So it was eating away the threads that the bolt was supposed to fit into.
[00:02:49.760] – Michele Duwe
Yeah.
[00:02:50.870] – Jason Madison, QA Manager
We said, well, here’s a proposal. We also work with electroplating companies. We do some outside processing, and we do the logistics here through Deco.
So we said, rather than you having to do the logistics yourself, how about if we take the ownership of that process?
And so then we contracted with another plater that we work with on a regular basis, and we arranged an agreement that worked well with them.
And now our customers getting what they want. And we actually can see the parts before they go out.
So we know what the customer is receiving without it going through the third party first.
So it worked out to be… I mean, it’s pretty cliché to say win-win, but it really did in this case.
[00:03:28.640] – Michele Duwe
Yeah, it really allowed us take ownership then of having those parts match what our customer wanted and what they wanted to receive from us.
[00:03:36.560] – Jason Madison, QA Manager
Right. One thing that we do like to do at Deco is to make sure that if there’s a value added opportunity for a Zinc casting that we can manage those logistics for our customers so that they don’t have to worry about the value adds themselves. We have a lot of standard things like a pin gauge drawers here for every one thousandth of an inch all the way down in order to make sure that we can measure parts of any size, holes of any size.
[00:04:07.240] – Michele Duwe
So recently here at Deco, we revised our quality policy, and we all love this because it is so easy for us to remember, Jason.
Do you want to go ahead and tell us a little bit about what was the driving factor behind it and our new quality policy?
[00:04:22.770] – Jason Madison, QA Manager
Yeah. So we are an ISO 9001-registered company. And because of that, We have the quality management system, and one piece of the quality management system is that we have to have a policy. It’s the quality policy that basically everything falls under that. For the first many years of Deco’s ISO registry, we had a stuffy wording that described how we were going to work on improving things all the time and how we were satisfying our customer and how we were going to invest in our employees. And pretty much nobody remembered it.
So we felt this last year after our recertification audit that we needed to revise this. And this was actually the idea of Chris Storlie, our CEO. And he said, since we’re an ISO 9001-registered company, how about we make a simple quality policy that uses those three letters, I, S, and O.
And so we did some brainstorming together, and Chris basically came up with this main thought that, I am responsible for quality, satisfying the customer and finding opportunities for improvement.
So now that simple statement is our new quality policy, and we rolled that out this year. It was really great.
[00:05:40.440] – Jason Madison, QA Manager
Now we just know that I, S, and O are the letters that define our quality policy. So it’s just fun.
All of the inspection work that we do in our quality department is controlled by our custom-made databases that have our custom inspection plans on them for each customer’s part number.
And so we use the computers and we use all of the general equipment as necessary according to the inspection plans that we put in place in order to control product.
[00:06:05.350] – Michele Duwe
Well, Jason, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to meet with us. And I hope that you found this beneficial. And feel free to leave us any comments down below if you have questions that Jason can answer for you.
