The company J3L designs and manufactures luxury metal parts for high-end fashion brands. These pieces are then mounted on leather accessories such as purses, shoes and belts… a demanding sector to say the least, one which does not tolerate defects or production anomalies.
It was in this context that the J3L quality management team sought a way to guarantee the quality of every product in its catalogue, from the design phase to the end of the production line, at each of its four sites in France and Portugal. The Head of Quality of J3L wanted a robust, automated solution to structure J3L’s problem solving & root cause analysis process.
J3L contacted AXSENS, which had developed ProWhy, an innovative problem solving tool in collaboration with the reputable French engineering school ENIT (Ecole Nationale d’Ingénieurs de Tarbes).
Maemouna Dia from the Lyon office of AXSENS launched a study of the J3L case and how ProWhy could meet their needs. She gave the quality management team a demonstration of the tool. “They especially liked the fact that ProWhy would become the living memory of problem-resolution in the whole company,” said Maemouna. “The support we offer in deployment and after-sales technical issues was also a key factor in choosing us.”
After a diagnostic phase, the AXSENS technical team configured and customized the ProWhy tool for J3L, then installed it onto the group server and deployed it across all the J3L sites.
Then Maemouna gave hands-on training courses to 23 employees, including method owners, quality managers, designers and production. The interactive training courses revealed the root cause analysis and problem solving process in J3L was not used in all services and issues were resolved mainly within the Quality department. The training courses thus allowed every employee to brush up on their 8D/9S skills, to be able to apply them on the shop floor later.
During the course of its ProWhy deployment in 2020, J3L had the pleasure to announce their acquisition by a market-leading luxury fashion brand. While their integration into the organization is ongoing, they expect that their processes may well be a benchmark for the whole group.
AXSENS is proud to have accompanied them in the improvement of their problem solving process and wishes them all the best in this new chapter of their growth.
