Every day your factory receives products, materials, components, and accessories. Unfortunately, some of them aren’t going to be OK for use. What to do with them?
Creating a material review board of key staff to make that decision quickly is a good plan for most manufacturers. Here’s why…
Go to any factory in China and you’re likely to find an area or room with lots of scrap parts that seem to be just sitting around gathering dust. That’s because they don’t have a system in place where someone takes the initiative to do something with them, so in the end, no one takes any initiative! This waste of resources and money can be avoided, though, by forming a material review board of select staff who will briefly meet and review the ‘nonconforming items’ in order to make speedy decisions on what to do with them.
What is an MRB?
The MRB is a mechanism to make the right decisions about NC materials quickly and reduce scrap and rework where possible.
It is usually chaired by someone from the quality department. Sometimes the chair comes from procurement.
Who else might join?
Perhaps a manufacturing engineer, representatives from purchasing, production, project management, and other kinds of engineers, too, such as mechanical and quality engineers.
Their task is to meet for just a short while when needed (the point is, no material should wait for a decision for long because feedback to the supplier cannot wait and production planning may also be affected!) to tackle the status of non-conforming items.
What’s the material review board process?
The best practice for the MRB process is for a questionable batch that is “waiting for MRB decision” to be placed in a designated area and quarantined, this means not used for production until a positive decision has been made by the MRB!
An NCR (Nonconformance Report) is created including the information about batches in the quarantine area, and that NCR is the input for the subsequent MRB meeting discussions.
During the meeting, the board members will examine the NCR and make decisions on what should happen to the non-conforming items.
If sorting the bad products out doesn’t take too long, a quality inspector would usually do it and the report would be shared with the MRB (no need for a decision about that batch, but the supplier may need to take action to prevent recurrence of the issue and this will be advanced to them by the MRB).
Each member of the board evaluates the potential impact of the decision made from their point of view, which is why having representatives from the different departments who are involved in the sourcing, production, and the checking process helps deliver a balanced view.
A typical material review board process goes something like this:
- A nonconforming condition is discovered and documented via an NCR
- The material is segregated and marked (or perhaps segregated by marking it)
- A copy of the NCR is forwarded to the MRB meeting chairman
- The MRB meets (daily or weekly) and determines a disposition for the NC material. Some possible dispositions are rework, scrap, use-as-is, return to vendor (RTV), etc.
- Each member signs on it (for accountability) and may write comments
What are the typical MRB decisions?
In general, the material review board will make the following types of decisions on the fate of NC materials:
- No decision required by MRB. If no issues are found on a batch of incoming material, no need to ask for a decision from the MRB. The materials can go into production safely.
- Use-As-Is. If the issues are found to have either no or a low incidence on quality the incoming batch may be accepted. An exception may be requested from the customer(s). The engineers and the manufacturing people on the board should be able to suggest if the materials are able to be used as is without negative effects.
- Rework/RTV/Scrap. If the issues are severe and affect the vast majority of the pieces, the decision is usually to send the material back to the supplier (or to request the supplier to send a team to rework on site), or to scrap it. Rework can be preferable to scrapping materials and the purchasing reps and engineers can decide if the value and time required to do the rework make it a worthwhile task.
If not, returning defective materials to the vendor can be effective financially if it’s clear that they are not acceptable (such as non-functional PCBAs that were supposed to have been tested).
The last resort is scrap. The MRB will examine what went wrong and calculate the costs of the scrap. Over time the answers will give them a view of where the most scrap is generated from and its costs. This may influence future purchasing decisions and guidance given to the supplier in order to reduce scrap. - Perform 100% inspection and sort. If the issues are severe but only affect 3-20% of the products, 100% of the materials can be inspected by the quality inspectors or (more likely) by production operators at the start of the line. Bad products are sorted out (and then the above decision to rework, RTV, or scrap is made*), with the remaining good ones used in production.
*For example: after the batch is fully inspected and sorted, “bad” products can be sorted out, “not very bad” products can be reworked on the line, and “good” products can be used as-is.
In all cases, the supplier has to be made aware of the problem/s and agree with the situation and outcome recommended by the MRB and if there were serious issues where the supplier was requested to take action, they have to demonstrate that corrective actions have been implemented.
Conclusion
Do you use a Material Review Board in your organization? If so, how have their decisions benefited you? If not, how do you keep track of and decide what to do with NC materials? Let us know by commenting or contacting us.
P.S.
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