Finding quality problems on the shop floor begins by modeling your production processes. Larry Adams Senior Editor Rejects are up. Measurements are off.
Capacity is down.
In a manufacturing environment, it is sometimes hard to see the proverbial forest for the trees. The whole system is difficult to see because of the proximity of the individual processes. A cross-functional chart shows how the actions of different departments in a company affect the manufacturing process, as a whole, and the finished product. That is the idea behind process mapping. By documenting processes on paper, or integrating that information with other information using process mapping software, manufacturers can more easily identify the main sequence of activities, highlight bottlenecks and redundancies both obvious and not so obvious eliminate unnecessary steps and nonvalue-added activities, and clarify critical connections across individual operations and departments.