The main reason a facility should implement an effective LPA system is to enhance their competitive advantage. Good LPA systems will identify variations in high risk processes that could lead to the production of non-conforming products. It will also help identify error-proofing systems that become ineffective over time. With appropriate containment measures, this prevents bad product from shipping and reduces or eliminates customer rejections.

A system that has real-time reporting of non-conformances will guide management to the exact locations to direct their resources to review symptoms, identify problems and find their root cause(s). Most importantly, it will allow different levels of management the opportunity to review and agree with the immediate containment and corrective action for each non-conformance before possible shipments are made to the customer.

There are several ways to measure the effectiveness of ones LPA system. Good LPA systems will show improvement in many of these areas over time:

• The overall cost of poor quality
• Number of non-conformance that could lead to decreased efficiency or customer rejects
• Overall time to close corrective actions
• PPM (parts per million)
• Number of internal rejections
• Scrap costs
• Rework costs
• Warranty costs
• Downtime
• Number of improvement ideas received during audits

If your facility would like to improve any of these measurables, while at the same time improving internal communication between manufacturing and management, a well-designed Layered Process Audit system is the answer.

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