To make it in today’s competitive manufacturing environment, especially as a small- to mid-size manufacturer, there’s little room for error. Producing quality products is essential. You have customer trust and brand reputation to uphold, and any misstep can damage those–as well as put you at risk for legal and regulatory consequences.
A comprehensive approach to quality control (QC) ensures customers are satisfied–and don’t feel duped–but also that your business is compliant with regulatory standards. It also minimizes costly waste and mistakes. For industries like food and beverage, pharmaceuticals, and packaging, fill and weight control in manufacturing is a critical aspect of QC–with the ability to impact profitability, brand reputation, and customer loyalty.
In this article, we’ll take you through why weight control in manufacturing is so important to your business’s longevity, as well as cover some practical steps to manage it.
Quality control in manufacturing
Quality control (QC) in manufacturing “refers to the processes and procedures to ensure that products meet specific standards and requirements before reaching the consumer.” It differs from quality assurance in that quality control takes place during inspection and focuses on identifying and managing issues and ensuring uniformity in the final product before it's sent to your customer.
Quality assurance, on the other hand, is more preventative, focusing on processes and standards throughout production to ensure quality expectations will be fulfilled and prevent defects from occurring.
Practically, quality control involves a system of several different elements and procedures that fit together to verify you’re shipping a high-quality product that meets regulatory standards and requirements, as well as customer expectations and standards.
These should include:
- Product testing: Many different methods of product testing and product inspections are all meant to validate the quality of the product before shipping to the customer. If an error is found, you might carry out sort inspections to determine if it is an isolated issue or has impacted more than one batch of products.
- Process documentation: Process documentation, including developing Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), is helpful throughout the production process, making accountability and traceability easier. For quality control, it’s important to document the testing, inspection, and analysis processes in detail–as well as to provide feedback and insights back to production SOP’s anytime there is an error caught in QC that triggers a change to a production process.
- Employee training: Product quality relies on the entire pre-production, production, and post-production team, so part of a robust quality control program should include employee training on why it matters–including regulatory compliance–and the procedures the QC team uses.
Cultivating a culture of continuous improvement, where employees embrace an ongoing dedication to incremental and even micro change and improvement, will also naturally lead to increasing quality. This leads to higher levels of customer satisfaction, better compliance, and smoother quality control workflow. It also encourages ideas and feedback from employees at all levels, leading to a sense of ownership, a culture of excellence, and ideas to address both immediate customer needs and anticipate future demands.
Weight control in manufacturing
There are a variety of different quality standards manufacturers must adhere to, depending on the country and industry they operate in. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO), for example, sets and governs a set of standards that help manufacturers stay compliant with government and regulatory standards. Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) and Good Laboratory Practices (GLP) are other sets of standards that ensure quality production as well as the integrity of safety test data.
In Canada, the FCAC and Health Canada also regulate manufacturers to ensure the quality and integrity of consumer products, pharmaceuticals, and food and beverage productions and protect the safety of consumers. The Consumer Packaging and Labeling Act and Regulations require labels to contain “accurate and meaningful” information, to help consumers make informed purchasing decisions and protect them from false or misleading claims.
One crucial piece to quality control is to know precisely which regulations affect your industry and to understand the legalities you must navigate and adhere to. For industries including food and beverage, packaging, and pharmaceuticals, weight control is an important part of quality control.
Weight control refers to the process of ensuring that products are filled precisely with the exact amount specified on the product label. This is important from a compliance perspective, as regulations exist to ensure the product contains the amount it says it will. But it’s also important from a customer or consumer perspective.
As part of quality control, weight control exists to identify and manage overfill, also known as giveaway, and underfill. Overfill or giveaway refers to when a product is filled with more material than specified on a label. While this may leave a good impression on your customers, overfilling is unnecessarily costly.
Underfill, on the other hand, refers to when a product unintentionally contains less material than specified on the label.
While different from intentional underfilling practices, like shrinkflation and slack fill, all three concepts have similar negative consumer implications.
Shrinkflation refers to the manufacturer's practice of intentionally reducing the size or quantity of a product while keeping the packaging and price the same–often to manage increasing production costs without explicitly raising prices to the consumer. Shrinkflation is not illegal, if the product quantity matches the stated amount on the label or packaging. However, the result of shrinkflation is often that consumers feel deceived when they realize they’re getting fewer products for the same price.
Slack fill refers to the empty space within a product’s packaging that doesn’t serve a functional purpose, such as protecting the product or aiding in its display. Slack fill can become a legal issue when that space misleads consumers into believing they are getting more product than they are. Because of this, there are regulations in place to prevent non-functional slack fill in many industries–particularly food and beverage.
While underfill is often unintentional, all three of these practices can result in consumer dissatisfaction, damage to the brand and reputation, and legal or regulatory penalties if the manufacturer is found to be misleading customers or violating standards.
This is why, in addition to other quality control practices and standards, manufacturers in industries like food and beverage, pharmaceuticals, and packaging must ensure accurate product quantities and weight. Whether it’s overfill or underfill, profitability, brand reputation, and long-term customer relationships are all impacted by weight control.
Next, we’ll walk you through five key elements of an effective weight control program to help you address issues, set and track targets, optimize profitability, and reduce risk.
Assess and analyze your data
To control weight and fill, you need to know your current status with it. Typically, you can capture this type of data during the filling process, then chart it with your current target or nominal weight as well as your upper control limit (UCL) and lower control limit (LCL). These limits are established through a comprehensive understanding of the compliance standards and legalities your organization is responsible for, so be sure you have that understanding first.
Statistical process control (SPC) is a system that proactively uses data to monitor the manufacturing process for defects, helping you move away from expensive, time-consuming post-production inspections while helping you better address production issues. While there are a few different methods you could use for statistical process control, a simple way to get a clear picture of your data is to use a control chart that uses a line graph to display fill data over time, tracked against targets, UCL, and LCL. To streamline this data analysis and make accessing insights easy, Worximity’s production monitoring solution includes a feature to monitor both overfill and underfill in real-time by connecting to either tabletop scales or inline check weighers. The feature then plots that data on an SPC chart for you.
Determine fill weight targets
Your data analysis will help you determine where there are issues and areas you need to prioritize first. It can also give you the information you need to establish new fill weight targets, depending on how much change is required. Optimize your new weight targets by first decreasing and eliminating overfill or underfill issues that put you at risk for waste, compliance penalties, and/or consumer complaints. Then, you can continue your improvement process by optimizing to maintain profitability.
Communicate weight targets with tracking charts
Communication is critical to ensure operational adoption once you’ve done your data analysis and set new weight targets. It’s always helpful to communicate why the change is required. Explain the consequences of overfill and underfill, how it impacts not only the company but also employees and their jobs, as well as the organizational strategy.
Then, post the charts that communicate your new weight control targets and limits, as well as track progress. This not only serves as a reference and reminder right there in production, but it also helps motivate by visualizing team progress. Don’t forget to share team wins–even small ones–as you go, to help employees understand that their efforts are making an impact.
Keep communication regular and ongoing
Particularly when there’s a weight control issue to be addressed, it’s important to establish WC as part of regular shift and management meetings. Data and information should be tailored to the meeting and the team members involved, but to progress, someone should be assigned to each task, with a due date, and 2-3 key KPIs should be addressed during each meeting.
Continuously review results and targets
Even as issues are triaged and addressed, if weight control is an important part of quality control for your organization, it should be accounted for in meetings over time to ensure you’re successfully minimizing fill or weight variation, and targets are still optimal.
Final thoughts
Product quality is crucial in manufacturing, and for certain industries, it’s not just every cent and every second that counts, but also every gram. Weight control in manufacturing is a critical part of your quality control process and managing it starts with your data. Once you understand where the variations in fill and weight are happening, you can uncover why they’re happening and make changes to keep profitability optimal and reduce the risk of compliance and regulatory penalties, and loss of customer trust.
