Case Study: Quality Report

Industry: Manufacturing

Background: About 2 years was spent using SAP BI to create a standard quality report that could be used by all areas. In the end the report was great for high level reporting, but it wasn’t very useful at the lower levels where it was needed to identify process improvements and verify their effectiveness after completion. There were three main problems with the report at that level:

- Workcenters: Users were not able to drill down below high level work center groupings (long story)
- Data Normalization: All quality reports were based on counts of QNs (Quality Notifications). This worked well for areas that built the same parts consistently, but other areas had fluctuations in both what parts they were building and how many. (think if the count of QN’s goes up year over year the assumption would be “we are doing worse” but what if you are just building more parts).
- Only QNs: this company had two different ways to report nonconformance’s. QNs (Quality Notifications) in SAP and NCR (Non Conformance Reports) in their MES system AMPs. Due to the quality reporting system being SAP BI, it only looked at QN’s and totally disregarded NCRs (which could account for up to 90% of the nonconformance reports in some areas).

Tool: Excel, Power Query, Power Pivot, DAX and eventually put into Power BI

- Connected into the MES system to include NCRs
- Allowed user to drill to the lowest level of workcenter
- Normalized the data based on # of opportunities (closed orders or direct labor hours)
- Visuals allowed users to quickly answer two questions
  - Is my area doing better or worse: Used a time series
  - What area, part, process type, defect should I focus my improvement efforts on: Used paretos which allowed the user to drill down to the appropriate level.