Importance of lot Traceability

Importance of lot Traceability

Name:

Instructor’s name:

Course title:

Date:

Importance of lot Traceability

With the automobile industry becoming increasingly competitive, lot traceability has also become more important in equal measure. Traceability refers to point of origin of components, history of their manufacture and their distribution. It can be viewed as a form of insurance. For example, brake pads to be used in the new product have different serial numbers depending on country of origin, their material composition, and date of manufacture (Bagley, Roellig & Massameno, 2016). Both chemical and physical properties of the brake pads may be included.

Lot traceability is crucial in the automotive and manufacturing industry for several reasons. The first important factors is to comply with both industry and government regulations because it’s a legal obligation. Another reason is that in the manufacturing industry lot traceability is used to better manage or improve relationships with customers. Through traceability, time required to react to customer complaints is significantly reduced and thereby guaranteeing higher levels of consumer satisfaction. It helps improve production process and reduce costs incurred in recall campaigns.

Short-term objective of lot traceability is to pinpoint defective brake pads after the automobile has been delivered to the customer in order to reduce costs of automobile recall. This minimizes the number of automobiles that must be recalled whenever a manufacturing flaw is detected by only selecting serial numbers of faulty brake pads. Long-term objective of lot traceability is to detect defective brake pads before being delivered to customers. This significantly reduces in-process expenses (short-term benefits) and also reduces costs and the need of automobile recall (long-term benefits).

The competitive nature of the global economy has challenged automobile manufacturers and their supply partners to continuously comply with government regulations and to continuously improve product quality. Despite more emphasis being put on spare parts quality standards, automobile industry is still weighed down by high costs of warranty (Mpshe & Kanakana, 2015, December). Increasingly complex regulations that must be complied with increase warranty costs significantly. Therefore lot traceability restricts the magnitude of automobiles affected whenever defective parts are recalled.

References

Mpshe, T. T., & Kanakana, M. G. (2015, December). Dynamics of a relationship between quality and productivity in the automotive manufacturing industry. In Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management (IEEM), 2015 IEEE International Conference on (pp. 441-445). IEEE.

Bagley, C. E., Roellig, M. D., & Massameno, G. (2016). Who Let the Lawyers Out?: Reconstructing the Role of the Chief Legal Officer and the Corporate Client in a Globalizing World.