Causes of Inspection Errors
Sandeep Kumar
Project Quality Management | Six Sigma | Data-Driven Decisions | Process Excellence
Inspection refers to any activity performed to ensure that products meet specific standards before release. Inspections are conducted to ensure that products are free from defects. Inspection plays an essential part in many industries, including critical sectors such as nuclear power plants, aircraft, and medical devices.?
In this post, we will look at various factors that could lead to inspection errors and how to avoid these mistakes.?
Causes of Inspection Errors
When a quality inspector makes a mistake, it could have serious implications. The following are some common causes of inspection errors:
1. Bias
The term "bias" is defined as a prejudgment or predisposition. In the context of an inspector, it means that when an inspector makes a judgment about whether something is acceptable or not, they may be predisposed to accept or reject certain items based on their personal experience with them. This could lead to an incorrect assessment of the item's condition.
2. Fatigue
This one is pretty self-explanatory. When inspectors get tired, they tend to make mistakes. If an inspector has been inspecting for hours without breaks, they may begin to develop some mental block that prevents him from making good assessments.
3. Flinching
A flinch is when an individual involuntarily reacts to stress by moving their body away from the source of the stress.
Suppose the inspectors are under pressure from the management to reduce the number of defectives. In that case, there is a good possibility that inspectors will start accepting the borderline lines that in reality should have been rejected.
4. Distraction
Distractions happen all the time. An inspector might look around at other things while performing inspections. Or they might become distracted by something else entirely. Either way, this type of error can result in a missed defect. An inspector who is focused on the task at hand will pay better attention to what they need to do.
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5. Environment
The working environment (lighting, temperature, noise level and humidity etc.) has a significant impact on inspection errors.
6. Poor Time Management
When inspectors don't properly manage their time, they end up making mistakes. There is a possibility that the inspector is not allowed enough time to complete the inspection requirements.
7. Poor Communication
If the inspector is inspecting an item on behalf of a client and does not have the correct information, that will result in an inspection error. Sometimes the inspector has an obsolete drawing that they use for inspection because the client did not bother to send an updated drawing to the inspector.
In some other cases, the inspector might not have the complete list of requirements and specifications to perform the inspection.
All these are examples of poor communication leading to inspection errors.
8. Lack of knowledge/Skills
Many times, inspectors don't have the proper training to perform their jobs. If a multi-disciplinary inspection job has to be completed by a single inspector, they might not have all the skills required to perform that multi-disciplinary inspection job.
How To Prevent Inspection Mistakes?
View the original post here ... Inspection Errors and how to prevent them?
Supplier Quality Training (CSQP) ... https://www.qualitygurus.com/link/csqp/
Head of Quality Assurance, Richmond
3 年Hi. This is an interesting post. I particularly liked your descriptions of the sources of inspection errors. I think these are also very applicable to auditing, an area of great interest to me. However, the sutions part of this article did not seem to address all causes of inspection errors For example, distraction, time management, environment and management attitudes leading to flinching have not been addressed.
Principal Design Engineer at Fluor Canada, Calgary Alberta
3 年Great article Sandeep. In the quality world, everything is quantified and we stay away from a qualitative argument. The reasons listed above are more like qualitative reasoning given for poor inspection. Do we have statistics available for each of the reasons listed above for the Reason for poor inspection?
Construction Coordinator
3 年True analys