Don't make it worse! - minimize downtime and scrap by including raw materials in your analysis.

To prevent raw material problems in the future:

1.  Characterize all of your raw materials. Thermal characteristics, particle size distribution, chemistry are important properties that should be analyzed and recorded. These properties will be a fingerprint so you have a baseline to compare future raw materials against. Unfortunately, very few plants have done this and are destined to pay the price.

 

2.  Write great purchase specifications. These specs must include all physical and chemical properties.

 

3.  Enforce supplier communication. All changes to a raw material must be communicated to your quality engineers, process engineers and plant chemists. No matter how insignificant the change may be to the supplier, they must communicate it to you and your engineers.

Hopefully you’ll heed my warnings and characterize your raw materials. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me. I would love to talk to you further.

Take Aways:

1.  Downtime/scrapping events are mishandled because too much focus is placed on the manufacturing process, and not  enough attention is placed on raw materials.

 

2.  It is critical that physical and chemical properties of ALL raw materials is benchmarked long before a problem occurs.

 

3.  Suppliers must communicate all raw material changes no matter how insignificant they feel the change may be.