The converting industry is under pressure to boost efficiency, cut costs and elevate product quality. Quality control answers many converting challenges, including rising inflation and complete competition. For some industries, strict regulations and uncompromising standards make quality control more critical than ever.
Quality control encourages a quality consciousness throughout your operations. It simplifies your output with a predefined set of standards you can use to enhance your operations. The quality control process is as crucial for your suppliers as it is within your own operations. Understanding how these processes change depending on your industry is essential to streamline your workflows and minimize downtime.
Understanding Quality Control in the Manufacturing Process
Quality control in the converting process involves transforming raw materials into finished products to meet converting industry standards. It’s a vital element of all manufacturing processes that involves strict adherence to standardized processes. Implementing quality control measures allows manufacturers to improve product quality, reduce waste and boost consumer satisfaction.
In the converting process, quality management is the foundation for success. It allows you to maintain compliance with industry standards, pushing you to assess your manufacturing processes, identify issues and make improvements. Over time, this posture of continuous improvement in manufacturing saves you money through error reduction.
Quality Control Measures and Standards
Quality control measures and standards comprise specifications and guidelines so that materials, products and services fit their purposes. They give your organization a clear vision and purpose and allow you to satisfy customers’ quality requirements.
The ISO 13485 medical device standard implements stringent requirements for every part of a product’s life cycle, including service and delivery. To comply with ISO 13485, organizations must meet the requirements for a quality management system specific to the medical devices industry. They must demonstrate these quality management processes and ensure best practices throughout the converting process.
Essential Quality Control Techniques in the Converting Industry
Manufacturing operations use various techniques to maintain quality control in industrial, medical, electronics and aerospace applications, including:
Precision Die Cutting, Slitting Techniques and Laminating Processes
Quality control in precision die cutting must provide the highest levels of accuracy and repeatability. Some techniques to create compliance with these standards include:
- First article inspection: This process verifies that a product meets all engineering and design requirements specified in the blueprint. It involves inspecting a sample of the first product manufactured in a batch to ensure it meets all quality standards.
- Equipment inspections and calibration: Quality control teams use various purpose-built tools to inspect and verify converting equipment. These tools must be calibrated regularly to ensure reliable results during inspection.
- Environmental control: Maintaining strict environmental control is essential to assure high accuracy and repeatability in converting applications. Temperature control, clean room usage and regular equipment calibration mitigate the risk of external factors affecting converting results.
- Machine calibration: Regular maintenance and calibration of slitting machines is essential to maintaining high-quality results. Adhering to a strict preventive maintenance schedule allows converters to identify and rectify issues before they affect output quality. The slitter can cut the materials with the highest levels of accuracy, which minimizes waste and boosts productivity.
- In-process inspections: All products undergo first-article and in-process inspections using specialized vision technology. Other inspection tools, including calipers, micrometers and gauge pins, are essential for all slitting processes. An inspection report is generated to articulate critical dimensions and certificates of conformance.
- Employee training: A well-trained team is essential to maintaining quality standards. With proper training, your team can fully understand quality control procedures, equipment operation and problem-solving strategies.
- Temperature control: Hot melt adhesive lamination requires accurate control of adhesive temperatures to avoid changing the composite material’s properties. Thermal lamination requires high temperatures to get the most from the composite’s thermoplastic properties. Again, temperature settings must be precise to prevent ineffective bonding or degradation of the materials.
- Adhesive quantity: Maintaining control over adhesive application is crucial for quality control in lamination. Too little adhesive impacts bonding, while too much can cause thickness and stiffness within the composite. Quality control involves controlling the precise application of the adhesive.
- Nip control: Controlling the amount of pressure that smooths out the adhesive between rollers on the lamination line is essential. The pressure must be controlled to prevent distortion.
Addressing Scalability and Material Challenges
As production scales up, you must maintain the same level of quality control. Many challenges with this issue relate to the complexity and demand for repeatability across industries. Scalability becomes an issue without clear and measurable specifications for each product’s functions, performance, tolerances and defects. The following tips can help you address scalability challenges in converting:
- Implement a quality management system (QMS): A QMS framework helps you plan, execute and monitor your quality process as you scale up. It enables you to eliminate waste and error, assures compliance with regulations and fosters a culture of continuous improvement.
- Use quality control tools and techniques: These methods help you analyze, measure and improve the quality of your products and processes. Some options include statistical process control and root cause analysis.
- Train your staff: Your team is the foundation of quality performance. They must have the skills and expertise to perform their jobs correctly and the requisite training to fully understand quality standards, policies and procedures.
- Evaluate your quality results: Collect and analyze data on quality rates, including customer satisfaction and defect rates. Compare these results with your quality benchmarks and use any discrepancies to identify opportunities for improvement.
Material Selection for Quality Assurance
Material selection is the first step to successful quality assurance — the materials you choose for a product impact every element of the quality assurance process. Selecting materials with the proper mechanical, chemical and physical properties dictates your ability to maintain compliance with quality control standards.
Selecting the right materials starts with choosing the right supplier. Look for 3M preferred converters that have achieved the highest designation possible from 3M. When you partner with a 3M preferred converter, you can expect innovative solutions and engineering processes that minimize waste. You also have access to 3M’s leading materials and global supply chain capabilities, ensuring you can choose the right material for the most stringent quality requirements.
Implementing Effective Quality Control Protocols
Quality control systems contain many moving parts, all integral to maintaining quality throughout manufacturing operations. Each department within converting operations must collaborate to build a singular strategy that permeates your organization. Some steps for implementing successful quality control include:
- Establish quality standards: Quality standards govern whether a product is considered acceptable. They should be based on customer requirements, regulatory requirements and industry standards.
- Conduct inspections: Inspection and testing in converting are the foundation of quality control. They should be conducted at various stages of production to identify defects as early as possible.
- Execute corrective and preventive actions: As soon as you identify any defects, take corrective actions to address them. These approaches could include reworking or removing the impacted products. From there, you can determine the root cause of the defect and take preventive action to mitigate the risk of the issue happening again.
- Monitor and improve: Quality control is a fluid process that requires monitoring and a culture of continuous improvement to be truly effective. Monitor your quality control processes regularly and identify areas for improvement to increase efficiency and reduce defects.
Ensure Robust Quality Control With Advantage Converting
When you can rely on quality control from your suppliers, you can focus on creating a quality consciousness in your operation. At Advantage Converting, we aim to provide the highest quality products at a fair cost. We make ourselves available to you at every stage of the manufacturing process, from conceptual design to full-scale production. Our expertise makes us ideally positioned to handle your project requirements, even for the most complex designs.
As a 3M preferred converter, we’re recognized as an industry expert, ready and able to deliver innovative solutions for various industries. Contact us to learn more, and let us relieve some of your quality control challenges today!
