With the current popularity and trend of leather bags, quality control is paramount to producing a stylish yet durable bag. It ensures the retention of quality, durability, and customer safety across multiple batches, saving you from serious lawsuits. A small mistake can result in returns, repairs, and, most importantly, a big hit to the business: losing the customer’s trust.
If you are still unconvinced of its importance, let me introduce a different perspective—the financial impacts. Poor quality control can drain businesses quicker than you think. Unsatisfied customers often return products, leading to a loss of sales. Defects and errors can lead to waste and reworking of entire batches, wasting money and time. Sometimes, product recalls may even be necessary, making businesses lose millions.
So, if you’re a business owner looking for a solution to your quality issues, look no further because this article has got you covered! We have compiled the best ways for you to save up to $1 million by implementing tried and tested strategies of Statistical Process Control, Six Sigma Methodology, Quality Management Software, and everyone’s favorite- employee training.
· Understanding the Risks of Poor-Quality Control
Impact on Brand Reputation
Poor quality control comes with many risks. Firstly, the abovementioned problems lead to more product returns, which give your business a negative reputation. You lose customer trust, and as word of mouth spreads, no new customers try out your products either.
Take Coach as an example. When it decided to explore a more affordable market, its leather quality was compromised. Customers quickly started complaining about the worn-out bags, which led to a drop in its prestigious reputation. With their image damaged, Coach never tried to appeal to the broader market again.
While Coach addressed the problem in time, an Indian brand, Hidesign, faced a different fate. When the brand tried to enter its luxury products in the UK, customers reported leather quality issues of cracking, discoloring, and peeling. As word of mouth spread, there was a decline in sales, and eventually, due to financial losses, the brand had to shut down its operations in the UK.
Financial Losses
Improved quality results in fewer returns and recalls, which reduces the overall cost. When a bag is defective, extra money is required, including repairing, shipping, giving refunds, and managing logistics. Hidden costs also include the wasted material, extra labor required to repair the product and loss of customer trust due to which they may not reorder and cause a hit to the business.
Supply Chain Disruptions
As we saw above, maintaining consistent quality is important for a brand’s reputation and for saving extra costs. Apart from these reasons, these setbacks disrupt the supply chain, and additional delays in manufacturing the product and shipping may result in even more customers being dissatisfied, which a business must avoid at all costs.
· Establishing a Robust Quality Control Process
Setting Clear Quality Standards
You need to deliver what you promise! Customers’ expectations regarding the material, features, and craftsmanship should be a top priority for which quality control is essential. These things should be said in words and implemented, for which all of the staff must understand what and how they are supposed to do their work.
For this reason, proper documentation and training of the factory staff on how to implement their work are necessary. Also, there should be no barriers between the staff and the higher-ups, and the factory should promote open communication.
Regular Inspections and Audits
Regular inspections at different levels of the process are required so that any defect or mistake is noted and corrected in due time. Imagine the bag is at the last stage of production, ready to be shipped, and there is an issue with the material. How much time and money is wasted then?
Thus, timely inspections and audits must take place using comprehensive checklists to evaluate each aspect of the product and ensure all the functions and features are working properly. Moreover, third-party auditors can also be hired as they bring a fresh eye and an unbiased opinion to the table, which allows any mistake that could be overlooked to be corrected beforehand.
Supplier and Factory Relationships
A constant and strong relationship between suppliers and factory owners is key to ensuring consistent quality. By doing so, the product quality stays the same, and with open communication, any issues can be negotiated easily. Also, changing suppliers incurs additional costs, which can easily be avoided. Clear-cut expectations should be set from the beginning with proper documentation and contracts with pre-decided costs to avoid any future mistakes. Moreover, frequent reviews and testing should be done to see where they stand and if any changes are supposed to be made.
· Implementing Quality Control Tools and Techniques
Statistical Process Control (SPC)
SPC is used to monitor and control manufacturing processes using statistical techniques. It takes data from the production process to identify trends and variations. This enables the process to run at its full potential and produce consistent results.
Control charts are where you plot data points and figure out if variations are because of a common cause (exists in the process) or a special cause (exists due to external factors). Process capability analysis checks how well the process produces products within specified limits. Histograms and Pareto charts allow for visualization of data distribution and identify which factor is most significantly affecting quality.
SPC can be applied in different stages of leather bag production. Control charts can be used in material inspection to check the quality of incoming leather, for example, whether the thickness meets specifications. In the cutting process, SPC can check for precision in the dimensions of the pieces cut; any deviations can be controlled and sorted.
Six Sigma Methodology
Six Sigma Methodology focuses on reducing defects and variations. It increases overall efficiency, detects and addresses the origin of defects, and reduces variance to guarantee uniformity. It employs the DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control) approach. In leather production, defining can set clear goals like reducing defects by 10% this month.
Measuring can collect data on the production process, i.e., the length of pieces. Analyzing identifies the cause; maybe a specific machine causes more defects. Improving finds solutions for the cause, like calibrating machines regularly. Finally, control ensures that improvements are maintained, including frequent inspections or monitoring.
Quality Management Software
In this digital era, tons of software tools are available to help manage and track QC. Here is a list of some of the more well-known tools:
- Arena: helps supply chain communication
- Ideagen: helps monitor performance and analytics
- Process Street provides tailored templates, checklists, and workflow automation.
Using these will bring you several benefits. They enhance efficiency, reducing the time and effort needed manually. They detect issues in real-time immediately and help make informed decisions quickly. Automation also allows for more accuracy and less chance of human error. Digital tools also lead to significant cost savings in the long run.
· Training and Empowering Your Team
Skill Development for Workers
One cannot expect quality work from the factory staff without equipping them with the necessary training and skills required for the job. Thus, to ensure quality and perfection, trained workers are needed as they are more likely to pick up issues promptly, correct them, and avoid them in the future. There are several ways the workers can be trained, for example, training sessions from the higher-ups or already skilled workers, along with a comprehensive written guide as well as visual aid including step-by-step procedure which is easy to follow and understand.
Moreover, some trial experiments could be done with this hands-on experience, and they are more likely to understand and do their job correctly. The most important thing is constant evaluation and timely feedback, along with a positive attitude and encouraging atmosphere, which will boost their morale and let them work even harder.
Encouraging a Quality-First Culture
Lead by example. Set a model for workers to follow which focuses on quality. Set clear vision and standards that put quality first. Include workers in decisions related to quality control so they feel more valued and reciprocate by taking ownership and being involved. Recognizing employee wins while holding them accountable for their actions will also promote ownership overall and in quality control.
Continuous Improvement
As reiterated repeatedly in the article, the importance of quality and perfection to achieve continuous improvement initiatives is needed, and without that, it isn’t possible. In making any product, especially leather bags, a factory, and business can compete in the market and become a top seller by constantly seeking ways to refine the product, better managing the process, and increasing efficiency.
For example, Kaizen implementation means starting small and minor improvements that can bring significant changes and improvements in the long run. Apart from this, the root cause analysis uses tools to identify the root of the issues and eliminate them.
· Calculating the Cost Savings
Identifying Costly Mistakes
Identifying mistakes in a timely can help avoid costly mistakes. For example, mistakes in cutting, stitching, designing issues, and using substandard quality leather can affect the business heavily. Workers who are not properly trained may not follow quality standards, which can affect the brand’s reputation. By ensuring customer satisfaction and efficient communication, these costs can be avoided by using the above-defined methods and ways to ensure quality damages can be reduced in a timely.
Estimating Savings from Improved Quality Control
Here is a step-by-step guide on calculating potential savings from implementing QC measures:
- Identify key metrics: the defect rate, return rate, and number of customer complaints.
- Calculate costs: costs of defects, returns, and customer service.
- Decide QC methods: SPC, Six Sigma, or software tools.
- Calculate savings and costs: Check current and projected costs for savings. For implementation, check investment costs.
- Calculate net savings: The difference between savings and implementation cost.
If you’re still not convinced, here are two examples of brands that had financial gains and saw increases in repeat business using QC measures:
- Luxury Leather Bags Inc. shifted to automated inspection systems and training for workers, which reduced their warranty claims by 40%, customer service costs by 35%, and increased production efficiency by 15%.
- Brand X Leather Goods adopted QC measures of pre-production checks, in-line inspections, and final audits. This decreased defect rates by 30%, return by 25%, and increased overall profitability by 20%.
· Conclusion
Thus, in conclusion, to ensure quality control in leather bags and reduce high costs, it is important to understand the risks of poor-quality control, establish a good and proactive quality control system, implement techniques such as SPC, Six SigmaSigma, and Quality Management Software, and train and empower your team to flourish your business. Follow these steps now and enjoy $1m cost savings, or head over to bagsplaza.com in case you’re looking for high-quality bags.
