Quality Digest

To the forum:

Ours is a company that builds power electronics and it started four years ago in a basement. It has grown, was purchased by a much large company and is still growing. One of the responsibilities that I inherited was in the fine-tuning of test letters and procedures as well as outright rewriting of them. One of the other things that I am trying to do is figure out some system of classifying defects by code so that in my Microsoft Access database an easy Pareto can be done. Right now, for each power electronic module that has a record in the database, there is a comments section that records what special problems the testers have. For obvious reasons, this isn't sufficient for paretos.

For starters, I was thinking of a hyphenated numeric code for classifying defects. For instance, the first digit would be a "where defect occurred: 1) from OEM, 2) in shipping, 3) during in-house manufacturing, 4) during in-house test, 5) out in the field". The second digit could be "type of defect: 1) electrical or 2) mechanical".

I am not sure that this is the best idea. The goal is to both help us arrive at root cause in our defects as well as be able to collect data and pareto it or use whatever other tools are useful to analyze it and eliminate defects.

Kelly Schauf