Did you know that poor inventory management affects your relationships with customers? A great customer experience starts with ensuring the availability of products your customers want. This is why working with simple inventory sheets and sales records is insufficient for businesses, even small businesses. Non-conformance is a non-conformity or NC report or customer complaint record for deficiencies identified after delivery.

Do you know that a non-conformance report or NCR is a big headache if it is issued to you? Non-conformance reports should be taken seriously by any party involved, particularly by the quality person who issued the notice. It can pull out any supplier or subcontractor or even a construction team representative if found and proven to be non-performing and refusing to maintain and follow instructions. Quality concerns are essential in the construction industry as they relate directly to a project of the ultimate goals, beyond just profitability. They are essential for every construction industry aside from being profitable because it is directly related to the project’s integrity and durability. 

What is a Non-Conformance Report?

Non-conformance reports, commonly known as NCR are used and issued by the Quality Assurance and Quality Control engineers or consultants on-site to a concerned party who deviated from a plan and or a specification of the construction project. NCR reports are important as there will always be a construction team or subcontractor who deliberately or unknowingly went off plan due to the tight schedule and or restrictions. 

Also, this report has to be issued as soon as possible even suggested on the same day for faster circulation of the document thus less time consuming for rectification. Non-conformance reports are also issued to a contractor who deliberately used materials which were not approved by the client, a failure in the design and strength construction methodology as per the client’s choice is not followed by any deviation to the client’s instruction for installation sequence of works and several other reasons. 

What is the procedure for Creating an NCR Report?

NCR reports record the non-conformity detected internally or reported by the customer. In the report, consider not only stating the non-conformity but also stating the requirement that the incident violated, as well as detailed evidence related to the event. As per the Non-Conformance, organizations need to document the actions, which are the dispositions. 

According to the standard, these depositions include corrections, rework, returning the product to the supplier or source of non-conformity, suspension, and concession. While the first three dispositions are straightforward, the last one, using the product as a concession appears to contradict the fundamental objective of the standard. Which is to ensure that products and services meet customer requirements.  

Another scenario is when the customer owns the spec and declines to revise the requirements. In this case, organizations must adhere to the customer’s new verbal or written requirements. To comply with the standard, businesses are required to document customer communications or record their verbal instructions. The final requirement for documenting non-conformities is identifying the authority responsible for deciding on actions. This part is simple. Your non-conformance (NC) form most likely includes a list of signatures required to authorize such actions. 

In another situation, rework is handled within the process. Here, the verification of correction is recorded in job travellers or job orders. The authority is usually defined in the job documents themselves, and often, it is either the inspector or the employee responsible for the operation. In short, use all practical measures such as correction, return to supplier, suspension, and usage adjustments when necessary. Document these actions in your non-conformance record, information to customers suppliers and regulators.

Why is an Automated Inventory Management System Beneficial from the Traditional?

There are several challenges faced by traditional warehouse management such as difficulty in tracking the actual location of stock items, difficulty in implementing first-in-first-out control, high operation cost and material traceability issues, too much manual data entry, and prompt to human error and low productivity. An automated inventory management system is specially designed to control and manage the day-to-day operations in a warehouse. Through automation, it guides the industry to inventory receiving and putting away, optimizes the picking and shipping of orders and advices on inventory replenishment.

An automated inventory system can cover critical warehouse operations including inventory control, packing, stock item location control, loading, receiving and put away, DO and dispatch, picking, stock movement, sorting and stock take. Automation involves cloud computing technology, QR code technology, web technology, real-time alerts, big data analytics and mobile technology.

After implementing automation systems in warehouses, productivity will increase and operation costs will be reduced significantly. Better warehouse management and warehouse stock control, allow management instant decisions and trigger immediate action if needed. Typically, there are several types of warehouses such as raw material warehouses, finished goods warehouses, temperature control warehouses and cross-dock warehouses. At a high level, this includes receiving and organizing warehouse space, scheduling labour, managing inventory and fulfilling orders.

Why is a Non-conformance Report Necessary on Site? 

It is necessary to issue a non-conformance report to eliminate the mistake or error created and record the corrective and preventive actions. This is to resolve issues on-site and alarm us not to recommend the same mistake. It will serve as an alarm bell. Any non-conformance should always be prevented on site as it is truly harming the construction timeline. Non-conformance freezes any ongoing work and would normally take up to two weeks for the construction work to come back to normal.

What is the Purpose of Issuing Non-Conformance? 

The main purpose of issuing a non-conformance report is to correct the mistakes made at the site. The other purpose is to ensure that the project is following the quality management system. Businesses must be accredited by the International Organization for Standardization or ISO which ISO 9001 to 2015 quality management requirements. It is stipulated there that NCR is to be documented and recorded. Corrective action and preventive action must be established. An NCR is an essential mechanism for withholding money from the contractor’s billing, though this is not its primary purpose. The client confidently withholds payment to guarantee that their project is executed precisely according to their requirements. 

Conclusion

While nonconformity cannot always be avoided because mistakes do happen within a company, the most important thing to keep in mind about this process is that the issue must be immediately handled. In other words, the identification of nonconformity within an organization is not the end of the process. But it will have more dire consequences if it is not properly identified, addressed, corrected, and prevented in the future. So effective disposition methodology is important to ensure that losses are minimized. The key objective is to understand its purpose and effectively implement it so that all the relevant stakeholders remain informed and it can be transparently accomplished.

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