Importance of Traceability in Manufacturing

More and more industries within manufacturing are focusing on compliance and quality, which lead to traceability. As companies expand their businesses internationally in this global economy, more regulatory mandates put commercial pressures and expectations on businesses. In an effort to manage quality, recalls, liability, counterfeit parts, inefficiencies in manufacturing, and cost savings, these regulatory mandates rely on traceability. In other words, traceability acts as a risk-management tool. Continue reading

Quality Control vs. Quality Assurance

One thing that all manufacturing industries have is quality. Whether its a quality system, quality standards, quality department, whether the company is small or large or in industry requires precision or not, there’s always some type of quality involved. Now here’s where people get things confused. Often you hear people talk about ‘QA’ when they really mean ‘QC’ and visa versa. Although both are an integral part of a quality system, there is a distinct difference between quality control (QC) and quality assurance (QA). It is also important to note that a successful quality system utilizes both quality assurance and quality control. So let’s get into the differences: Continue reading

What is an RMA in Manufacturing?

RMA

A Return Merchandise Authorization (RMA) is an authorization from a manufacturer for their customer to return products that do not meet the required specifications. Upon receiving products that have been returned, the manufacturer will either provide rework for the product in order to meet the requirements, exchange bad products for good products, or provide a credit or a refund. Continue reading

Manufacturing Lead Times Explained

 

Manufacturing lead timesYou’ve heard the saying, “I need parts yesterday!” As a manufacturer for over 50 years, we completely understand the importance of lead times with the success of a product. With manufacturing ramping up, we have experienced a wide range of lead time expectations for a variety of complex and simple parts. So we figured this would be the perfect time to define what all goes into determining lead times to help with planning and meeting your customer’s expectations. Continue reading

Estimating and Planning Manufacturing

Estimating and planningEstimating and planning to manufacture product is one of the most important stages of the entire manufacturing process. Both set the stage for how the manufacturing will be performed as well as determine the cost. Here at VIP, we find these two stages of pre-manufacturing to be the most important to invest time to ensure parts can be made effectively and with the capabilities in-house. There’s nothing worse than bidding a job without fully estimating the costs and planning out the manufacturing process, and find out you underbid it or you didn’t have the right equipment or tooling to actually fabricate. Here at VIP, we take everything into account when planning and estimating. So for this blog post, we are going to share some of the important types of information we look for in order to properly estimate and plan a request for quote: