Question: Please advice how we can control the rejection percentage from cut to ship. What is the way/ procedure/system that can help us to improve our rejection percentage? Please suggest. ... asked by Raju Singh
In garment manufacturing, it will not be a surprising thing if we found few rejected garments after shipment. Reason, most of the manufacturers believe that garments are soft goods and non-repairable defect may occur due to low quality raw materials or faulty process or employee casual behavior. However factory must have check points to control over this issue.
There is no ready-made solution that can reduce rejection percentage overnight. Each order is unique. But I can suggest you how to handle this issue and bring down rejection rate. Do i need to explain how to calculate rejection percentage of an order? It is equal to Total rejected garments *100/ Total cut quantity.
You got lot of rejected garment after shipment. You termed as rejected because those garments can’t be repaired by any means. You want to reduce the percentage of rejections in your future shipment. To reach your goal, follow my recipe: You need to read and act as you read to get result.
- Collect all rejected pieces. All means all pieces those were not shipped which is equal to cut quantity minus shipped quantity.
- Call your garment checkers who understand what are defects and can find why those garments are rejected.
- Ask them to diagnosis all rejected garments or defective garments. Defect analysis can be done to ways – one: you a have quality system in place where checkers check garments and make report during checking, two: after getting rejected pieces rejected by final checker (who don’t made report) do fault finding in those rejected garments.
- From your diagnosis, pick highest occurring defects (top 5 defects) and do exercise on finding root causes of those defect generations. Bring your quality personnel, production and technical personnel in this exercise.
- Once you found the list of root causes for each defects, your next task is to find the way how to stop making those defects again by eliminating root causes. I think this task will not be very difficult to you as you are in this business and understand how error occurred. In case, you don’t find the way to cure root causes you need to seek for help from your colleagues or experts.
- You found some solutions. Great! Make standard procedures to stop generating same defects during processing in future. Implement it. See the result is your next shipment.
- This is the way to improve cut to ship ratio and reduce rejection percentage rate. I believe - corrective action is the only remedy for stopping further defect generation
Best practices to control defect generation within your factory
- Make the workplace clean – From fabric store to cutting to sewing to washing and finishing.
- Place quality control system in place. I mean sufficient no. of checkers, trained checkers, checkers making report while checking, analysis of reports and take action based on the quality check reports.
- Conduct training program for the checkers on how to check piece correctly to capture defective pieces. Train them to make garment checking reports.
- Run quality awareness program for your employees.
- Quality standard must be understood by each employee and everybody have to work to meet quality goal.
- No low standard work should be accepted by the following department.
- In sewing line don’t allow operators to keep bundles open and each bundle must be completed before forwarding to the next. It will help you track missing pieces. As per my experience, operators throw pieces under tables when they make mistake or receive defective (incomplete) garments from previous operator. Nobody keeps track of these missing pieces until you found shortage of garments in finishing.
- Set standard operating procedures (SOP) for each task performed by your employees. SOP for quality control system for each department.
- Set audit team to audit your quality system in a regular interval.
- Implement 5S in your factory.