Quality Management in Spinning Industry
Mustaque Ahammed Mamun
Quality Assurance Officer,
Lamisa Spinning Ltd. Tongi, Gazipur
Email: mamuntex09@gmail.com
Quality management:
Quality management in spinning industry consists of four parts, such as; quality planning, quality control, quality assurance and quality improvement. Quality planning deals with planning the activities to meet the customer needs, whereas quality control deals with monitoring the activities using different control points and checks to ensure bad quality does not go to the customer. Quality assurance is focused on establishing systems and procedures to ensure that quality is achieved all the time. In this article I will explain all four parts of quality management.
Quality Planning:
Quality planning is the process of planning the production activities in order to achieve the goals of meeting the customer requirements in time, within the available resources.
In textiles, the ultimate consumers and the men involved in retailing are, normally, not technicians. Therefore, the customer’s requirements are not clearly captured and explained as required to a shop floor technician.
Let us take an example of 20s carded hosiery for knitting purpose. The customers always ask for the best yarn, and often refer to a benchmark like Uster Statistics and demand for 5% or 25% level. They never try to realize whether that quality is required for the product being manufactured and the technology adapted.
In some cases, the customer gives a sample of yarn and asks the spinner to match the quality. The men in laboratory analyze the properties of the yarn sample and give report to the spinner. The spinner tries to keep the same parameters of twist and count at spinning stage. Normally people do not realize that the samples given are not ring frame cops but are cones, hanks or a piece of cloth from which the yarn is taken out.
Quality Control:
We can define quality control as; A system for ensuring the maintenance of proper standards in manufactured goods, especially by periodic random inspection of the product.
The quality control is the process of checking and monitoring the process and products with an intention of preventing non-conforming materials from going to the customer. Various result areas are identified for each process and studies are conducted to verify whether those results are being achieved.
The control section normally has two separate sections: one for testing the product quality at different stages of production and also of final product, normally termed as inspection and testing, and the second one for studying the process, normally called as process control studies.
Normal tests done in a spinning laboratory are as follows:
- Cotton: Length, Micronnaire, strength, trash, neps level, colour, honeydew content, UV absorbency
- Lap: Trash%, fibre length, neps
- Sliver: Ttrash, neps, U%, hank variation
- Roving: U%, hank variation. Some mills have developed system for measuring roving strength similar to Lea strength testing of yarns.
- Yarn: Yarn count, count variation, TPM, Lea strength, single thread strength, U%, imperfections, Classimat faults, appearance, snarling tendency and hairiness
Quality Assurance:
Quality assurance concentrates on identifying various processes, their interactions and sequence, defining the objectives of each process, identifying the key result areas and measures to measure the results, establishing the procedures for getting the required results, documenting the procedures to enable everyone to follow the same, educating the people to implement the procedures, preparing standard operating instructions to guide the people on work spot, monitoring and measuring the performance, taking suitable actions on deviations and continuously improving the systems.
Quality Improvement:
Quality management or improvement in spinning mill is a never ending process. The customer’s needs and expectations are continuously changing depending on the changes in technology, economy, political situation, ambitions and dreams, competition, etc.
Founder & Editor of Textile Learner. He is a Textile Consultant, Blogger & Entrepreneur. He is working as a textile consultant in several local and international companies. He is also a contributor of Wikipedia.
