Quite often in manufacturing, an inspection department is treated primarily as a necessary overhead expense required to assure compliance to customer specifications. Sometimes an inspection department may also be treated as a profit center for compliance to a variety of test protocols dictated by external agencies, or perhaps internal procedures to demonstrate traceability to certain quality standards.
However, for those of us who are practitioners of lean principles, we quite often discover rich sources of opportunities for reducing, if not eliminating, a variety of non-value activities in your inspection processes that ultimately not only improve customer satisfaction but also improve your company profitability by systematically identifying and addressing the eight wastes often encountered.