Preventing Employee Mistakes and Product Recalls

Preventable employee mistakes cost industrial organizations hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars each year. They also result in the loss of valuable customers. Even worse, lack of good electronic tracking and traceability records can lead to massive recalls that can result in millions of dollars in legal costs or the company being forced out of business.

Some of the common preventable mistakes that employees make include:

1. Picking and shipping the wrong products or defective products to a customer.

2. Loading customer orders on the wrong truck.

3. Using the wrong materials in a mix, processing or assembly operation.

4. Using defective materials that have not passed quality control inspection.

5. Using the wrong process parameters or recipes and ignoring test results.

6. Not following required policies, procedures and practices.

At the very least, these mistakes lead to unhappy customers and excessive waste and scrap. For many other products, such as those used in transportation, defense, medicine, food and beverages, mistakes can lead to human tragedy.

Today many industries, such as food processing, are closely regulated by US Government agencies. Companies are required to maintain good traceability records so that they can quickly identify the source of a problem and then provide records as to all effected products that have been shipped to customers. Failure to produce these records, when requested, can lead to an order to recall all products made in the last three years, which will put most organizations out of business.

While paper records are allowed, they are no substitute for a good electronic database, which tracks all the data relating to manufacturing, processing and shipping products. This includes details of vendor provided materials and employees involved in the process as well as process, test and quality control data. This enables companies to rapidly comply with the one-step-backward, one-step-forward traceability recall requirements of many Government agencies.

It is not a case of whether an employee will make a critical mistake, but when, and what your organization is prepared to do about the resulting problems.

BellHawk Systems provides the technology to do real-time point-of-action validation of employee actions. This enables warnings to be provided to employees before and not after they have made a mistake. BellHawk Systems also provides the systems to capture tracking and traceability data so that this data can be used to quickly find the source of problems and to minimize the products that have to be recalled and scrapped.

For more information about BellHawk Systems' Tracking and Traceability applications, please click here.

For a free consultation on preventing employee mistakes, please call (508)-865-8070 and dial “1” for client services or send an Email to ClientServices@BellHawk.com.