Learning How To Handle Business Mistakes Before Losing Profit

Mistakes while making a part or operating a production line can be very expensive. It costs much more money to fix a mistake then building it in the first place. The first place that you lose money is in the cost of the material utilized to make the defective part. Not only do you have to pay for the materials again, however you also have to pay for the labor as well.

Paying for labor is expensive to start with, why pay twice to make the same part? After scrapping or reusing the material, you next have to factor in the time that was wasted to fix the problem. Was it a problem with the assembly on the floor or were the parts defective before they were assembled? Maybe the machine that punches out the parts was malfunctioning. How many bad parts did it make? How many of those bad parts are now in your final product? How many of them made it into the hands of your customers?

The problem should be able to be noticed immediately and there should never be more than one bad part made before it is identified and corrected. If the parts did make it out of the factory and into the hands of your consumers, what sort of damage can that mean? Are those customers going to trust you to do the work that they had in the past or are they going to lose faith in what you happen to be capable of?

After the problem is discovered and a plan is put into place, how timely is it carried out and do your consumers have good faith that you will correct the problem? Look at how Toyota handled the difficulties with their sticking brake pedals. For some people it was too late when they started to fix the problem, but it appeared to the general public that they began to solve and fix the problem the moment they became aware of it. Have they lost future and current customers because of the disaster?

Maybe they have, nevertheless they have probably kept more because of the swiftness and thoroughness that they tackled the problem. Customers will understand for the most part if it is a problem that doesn't have catastrophic consequences as long as you're up front and offer a quick solution to the problem. What they don’t want is delay and excuses.

Six sigma training is readily available to anyone. Look on the web to see what 6 sigma can make happen.