Product Quality Control to Minimize Defects Using the Six Sigma Method in Labor Intensive Industries

Abstract

PAIG is a manufacturing company that produces footwear components, especially the upper part, which receives orders only from one of the world's brands and will not be produced if there is no order from the brand. The problem is that the upper quality produced by PAIG in January-November 2023 has a higher defect than the target set by management. This impacted the high demand for additional materials and became wasteful due to the time-consuming re-production, which ultimately resulted in delays in the delivery of previously agreed orders.  This research aims to analyze the quality of products made by PAIG using the Six Sigma method and reduce the number of defective products currently occurring in the company. Six Sigma quality control uses the DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control) stages to determine the characteristics of product defects, factors that cause product defects, and improvements to the factors that cause product defects. By using the DMAIC stage, it is known that the types of defective products are divided into four categories, with the largest category being defective components, while PAIG's sigma level is 4.19, which states that there are only 323 pairs of defective products for every 1 million pairs of upper produced. The analysis of this research shows that PAIG needs a standard operating procedure (SOP) to minimize defective products in each process.