It is well known that product recalls are costly and should be avoided entirely if possible. The costs escalate mainly because of the lack of process traceability and product genealogy. As a result, either too many customers will get defective products or too many products will be recalled for repair or replacement even though they are not defective. Both scenarios have enormous cost and mainly perception implications. Therefore, it is imperative that there is early visibility into product quality and even beyond that there is a clear trace of the product genealogy and the process.

A good proactive traceability system can be enabled by Enterprise  Maintenance Gateway.

Working in collaboration with a BI Portal and a PLM system . EMG can work towards achieving the following goals:

(a)   Restrict the number of products that must be recalled by referring only to the specific serial numbers/batch Ids or Lot Ids that were associated with the faulty component or by  the faulty process.
(b) Work towards Eliminating recalls by providing real-time reports on the machines, components, stations, shifts and operators involved in the defective  product and  processes before the product is shipped.

EMG’s role in item (a) is to associate in real time, using its Business Context and Process Aggregation Counters, production identifiers such as batch ids, lot ids of supplier lots, production ids, etc., to the product ids and/or material ids WHEN the production is happening. This information is then passed in real time by EMG for storage in a Business Intelligence System and/or a Product Life Cycle Management System. As a result, if and when a situation presents itself for a recall, the specific serial numbers of the parts that are at fault are known and therefore the recall is only  restricted to those number of products that were associated/assembled with these parts during production.

As far as item (b) is concerned, EMG monitors real time production and aggregates/stores the information in its own database. A user from a business intelligence system can query the EMG system to get details on defective machines, components, shifts, etc., or a poor quality operator, even before the products are shipped out of the factory. An alert can be set on the dashboard of the BI portal to “look for” emerging signs of repeated faults in the shop floor. This could subsequently be followed by the querying mentioned above to ascertain if the faults are a local phenomenon or if there is a trend of defective items being produced by a certain operator, machine, etc. This eliminates “external failures” and limits the cost only to internal failures.

In the longer term, such a system contributes to production quality, cost containment and product warranty management – and most importantly, can ultimately improve customer satisfaction by reducing the risks and costs of poor quality and recalls.