Auditing The Use Of Fasteners In Your Manufacturing Facility

If you run a plant in the manufacturing industry, your main goal should be to maximize your profits. On the surface, this is a simple proposition. However, when you look at it more critically, you will realize that there are many things that affect the plant’s bottom line, and you need to pay attention to most if not all of them in order to maximize your profits. Making sure that even the little details are sorted out is very important and should never be neglected.

A good example of this is how fasteners are used in the facility. If you are not keen on this, you may end up spending a lot of money on fasteners, and this will then eat up your profits. You will then need to raise the prices of your goods to maintain profits, which will reduce your competitive edge. For this reason, one of the key issues you should focus on is how to do auditing of your fastener use in the facility to ensure that they are used in the most effective manner possible. Some of the things you will need to do to achieve this include:

Coming up with a method of accounting for them

You will need to adopt a method of accounting for the fasteners used in the facility. This is particularly important if you use very costly ones, such as titanium hex head cap screws or Hastelloy C276 socket head cap screws. Some of the simple ways of doing this include using a barcode system, where each fastener used is scanned by a barcode before being used. This way, you can easily identify which specific fastener was used by which employee, and to fasten which machinery. You can also do the same in batches if you are using other types of common fasteners.

Understanding how many fasteners should be used per job

If you are in an industry such as the automotive industry, you need to come up with a standard figure of how many fasteners will be used for a particular job. For instance, if you know that you need 20 bolts to fit all the wheels in a single car, you can then extrapolate this to the number of cars you have produced during a certain time frame, and then compare this with the number of bolts actually used. If you find that the reported number of bolts used is much higher than the ones needed to manufacture the cars, it will then be easier for you to investigate the shortfall.

Ensuring that all damaged fasteners are stored

One of the common reasons why you might use more fasteners than anticipated for a particular job is because some of them might become damaged during use. When your employees discard some fasteners on this account, it should be possible to account for them by simply counting them. You can therefore make it a policy that each damaged fastener should be stored in a particular facility to make it easier for you to audit fastener use in the plant in future. This will also give you some information about the quality of fasteners used.