Seeing a recurring defect before the customer does
Deviation and corrective action handling in printed packaging, where recurring issues stay invisible until they become a customer complaint.
A printed carton and label manufacturer turning over around three million pounds, serving food, cosmetics and consumer goods brands.
A delivered Orchyn engagement. The client is anonymised at their request. The company and the people are not named. The operation, the workflow, the controls and the outcome are as delivered.
The commercial problem
Deviation reports, photographs, batch records and complaints sit in email, spreadsheets and production folders. The quality manager spends too long consolidating evidence and chasing corrective action updates.
Recurring issues are hard to see until they surface as a customer concern or an end of month discussion, by which point the cost is already incurred.
How the work runs before
- A deviation or complaint is reported by email, photograph or spreadsheet row.
- The quality manager creates a record manually.
- They search batch, supplier and historic evidence for context.
- Corrective actions are assigned by email.
- Updates are chased and evidence collated by hand.
- Trends are reviewed manually, usually too late to prevent recurrence.
What makes it hard to automate safely
- The model must not decide product release, root cause, regulatory status, customer remedy or corrective action closure.
- Batch, production and source evidence must be preserved for human review.
- Quality events are commercially sensitive. Access is limited by role and by customer.
- The model must surface uncertainty rather than hide it behind a confident summary.
What we change first
A deviation taxonomy and a mandatory evidence list were agreed first so that similar defects would be recorded in comparable terms. Trend detection is impossible when the same defect is described five different ways.
The redesigned workflow
- A deviation, photograph or complaint enters one quality intake.
- The model classifies the deviation type, extracts batch, product, customer and stated symptom, then links all source evidence.
- It matches the event against historic records and flags a possible recurring pattern for investigation.
- The quality manager confirms classification, determines root cause and assigns corrective action.
- Open actions, due dates and owners are visible, with closure recorded by a person against evidence.
Where the model stops
The model classifies, links evidence and flags possible patterns. It does not determine cause, release product, agree remedy or close an action. A suggested pattern is a prompt to investigate, never a conclusion.
What we learned
Consistent classification mattered more than clever analysis. Once deviations were described in comparable terms, obvious patterns became visible without sophisticated modelling. The taxonomy was the intervention.