Yunus Digitizes Pre-Production Meetings to Increase Efficiency

The case studies mentioned herein were conducted using our earlier individual solutions: Inspectorio Sight (now Quality Risk Management), Inspectorio Rise (now Responsible Sourcing & Compliance), and Inspectorio Tracking (now Production Management). Inspectorio transitioned to a unified platform approach, enhancing and interconnecting these solutions under the Inspectorio Platform to better serve our customers. Click here to learn more about the Inspectorio Platform.

For Yunus Textile Mills, Pakistan’s largest manufacturer and exporter of home textiles, quality is at the core of their business and the products they sell.

Ensuring the highest quality for every client requires coordination and visibility in all stages of production. To achieve the level of connectivity needed across the production process, Yunus decided to digitize pre-production meetings (PPM) with Inspectorio.

By digitizing the PPM process, Yunus adopted a modern end-to-end internal quality management system to increase operational efficiency and better serve the needs of its clients.

“Digitization is one of the core stones of our growth strategy and we are aggressively moving forward with digitization and machine integration in all of our operations. It’s helping us improve efficiency, reduce human errors, enable transparency, and, most importantly, it provides us with data analytics to reengineer our process. Our partnership with Inspectorio is part of that overall strategy and we will continue to add more functionality until we create a completely digitized quality ecosystem with A.I. capabilities.”

Nisar Palla, Chief Operating Officer

Yunus has been producing textiles since 1962, emerging as a major global player in the past few decades. The company’s products are distinguished by an exacting degree of quality, competitive price points, and a consistent ethos of environmental responsibility.

Digitization began in earnest in 2019 when Yunus onboarded Inspectorio for quality and compliance assurance. “Inspectorio’s impact has been huge,” says Yunus’ QMS team. “Having a single platform has transformed us.”

Below we look at the next step in Yunus and Inspectorio’s journey: digitizing PPMs.

A One-Stop-Shop for Quality Management

Yunus’ goal is to implement a one-stop-shop solution for quality management, where all quality related activities can take place.

Yunus is able to do this with Inspectorio’s platform, where quality teams can conduct pre-production meetings, pre-final and final inspections, and analyze reports and CAPA after an inspection.

Yunus started digitizing pre-final and final inspections with Inspectorio, and the benefits the company experienced were significant. Yunus’ quality teams were able to:

• reduce the cost of quality
• easily locate defects
• improve inspector performance.

Due to this success, Yunus decided to move on to the next step, which was digitizing PPM with Inspectorio, obtaining a comprehensive solution that integrates all inspection activities on the same system.

“The future of digitization in manufacturing industries is not only arriving sooner, but it’s also taking a different shape than many expected. Yunus takes pride in taking lead to adopt digitization to improve visibility and transparency throughout its supply chain. We aim to make most use of the advanced technologies such as A.I. and machine learning in our decision-making process.”

Imran Ahmed Cheema, Chief Operating Officer, Home Division

PPMs Before and After Inspectorio

An effective PPM should serve as a checkpoint; manufacturing should only proceed if the meeting is deemed satisfactory by all. This requires a full discussion of all pre-requisites and actions to achieve smooth production flow.

Additionally, all parties must agree on:

• risk assessments
• a style bulletin
• a manufacturing control plan
• customer-provided specifications;

these need to be accessible and clear to all stakeholders.

However, achieving these goals was a painstaking effort before Inspectorio.

According to the Yunus team, they decided to digitize pre-production meetings once they felt a gap in the process in terms of recording meeting minutes and the availability of documents.

Digitizing PPMs has radically changed how Yunus conducts and leverages these crucial meetings — both before production and once it has begun.

Yunus has conducted more than 50 digitized pre-production meetings in 2 months’ time, since the manufacturer first rolled out this activity with Inspectorio. The digitized process to conduct PPM is now in full swing and has been implemented across the entire organization.

Inspectorio’s real-time reports and data sharing have improved Yunus’ accountability and efficiency.

“Yunus Textile Mills has the vision of digitizing all its quality assurance processes. For this reason, we’ve decided to digitize and optimize our Pre-Production Meetings with Inspectorio. We expect this initiative to ensure production is right the first time, reduce manufacturing errors, and bring visibility for our buyers and factories.”

Muhammad Obaid Mukhtar, General Manager QC/QA/QMS

The Benefits of Digitizing PPMs

It is clear that Yunus doesn’t view PPMs as an isolated step in the client journey. The PPM process is a step that informs every step and carries through to each stage of production.

Digitized PPMs have benefitted Yunus in the following ways:

1. Pre-Production Coordination 

With Inspectorio, Yunus is able to conduct pre-production activities on a centralized platform, ensuring all pre-requisites are in place and all stakeholders are aligned before production starts.

The benefits of this include:

• Getting production right the first time
• Ensuring smooth production flow thanks to clear, accessible communication
• 100% adherence to all agreed-upon terms

2. Customer Specifications

“During the manufacturing process, if anyone wants to see the customer specifications, they are available on the platform.”

This is a dramatic improvement from conventional manual processes, in which being able to reference customer specifications requires keeping many copies at hand around multiple factories

For a company as large as Yunus, with six factories, over 15,000 employees, and an ever-growing clientele, being able to pull up customer specifications at any time on Inspectorio’s platform has made them far more accessible.

3. Transparency and Visibility

Yunus is also benefiting from greater transparency and visibility in its manufacturing process. When it comes to clients, the Yunus team notes how “we can now show them the ways in which we prepared for manufacturing, as well as how we produce their goods.”

When there’s a customer complaint, having all points of the process permanently reviewable creates faster remediation.

Having easy and full-network access to documents, specifications, and requirements also helps Yunus’ quality teams control production, and compare the products to what was agreed on before.

Compare this with manual methods, in which a company must initiate a retrospective process of looking for glitches and deducing where the problem may have originated.

4. Proof of Method

Not only can Yunus produce better products, but they have proof of their process thanks to Inspectorio’s continuous aggregation of data. “Using the platform helps us show clients how secure our process is, which has also helped us improve our business.”

5. Stronger Internal Processes

All of this adds up to happier clients, better products, and more favorable margins.

According to the team at Yunus, Inspectorio’s platform will continue to make a huge difference in product quality, time savings, and transparency. It will keep the company stronger with regards to internal processes. It will help show clients how Yunus takes care of their products and their specifications.

When speaking about the effect this change has had on Yunus’ business, the Yunus’ team leans again on the company’s core principle of quality. “There is no doubt: if you get your product right the first time, if it’s been manufactured well and inspected well, your business will increase.”

Inspectorio: The Fastest, Most Effective Way to Digitize PPMs

A digitized PPM means real-time monitoring, analytics, risk assessment, automation, and interconnectivity of product CTQs from beginning to end. And when failure happens, remediation starts immediately with real-time, automated CAPAs.