For the past few weeks I’ve been working with joint compound used for taping sheetrock and I noticed that each pail had a drastically different consistency requiring me to add more or less water to correct the consistency. This reminded me of an actual situation that occurred in the workplace.
I was working for a company that used to develop color samples in a lab that would later become a standard. Every time an operator would follow the formulation to duplicate the standard, the color was either noticeably lighter or darker, which required the operator to custom color match the order. This took a lot of time, which delayed the order and it would drive our costs up because we would end up using more pigment which generated waste coating.
I started to look through the certificates of analysis (C of A) for the lab samples used to create the standards and compared them to the same pigments used for the scale up runs and noticed a tremendous amount of variation….the pigments from the lab samples were on the lower end of the specification, while the scale up pigments were on the higher end of the specification. The only way that we could duplicate the standards without having to customer color match was to require our supplier to deliver pigments that were closer to the low end of the specification.
Use your C of A’s to analyze the variation of your suppliers raw materials and to help you understand what your needs are so that you can communicate that information to your supplier….creating a win-win situation.
