STRICT MATERIAL SELECTION

Natural stone has inborn color variation. Great efforts are spent on the material selection and control.

• Material Selection:

  When we consider a new material, one consideration is the market popularity of the color, more important aspects we need to consider the structure of the stone, whether it is suitable for producing basins. Like some material is very beautiful but the structure is too loose, or have many crack lines, or water absorption rate is too high. Besides the structurer, we also consider the consistency of the material. Some quarries are too small, so the risk of unstable supply is high if the material come out with some problem. We prefer to select materials with high availability, many quarries are opened in a scattered large area.

• Material Control:

  Our production manager goes to quarry to choose the material for each lot of shipment. Some quarries do have different layers with different veins. So we prefer to have the same layer of material. We build up the relationship with the quarry workers, so when they come to the good layers, they will call us. And we purchase in big quantity to stock the material.

• Material Cut & Shipment:

  If the quarry have the gang saw to cut the material into our sinks size, we would ask them to cut the blocks in quarry. We pay higher price to ask for materials having good veins and without cracks. If we ship them back, and find cracks, we waste the shipment expenses.

• Working on Material:

  Workers are to inspect the material again by themselves, and reject to use the material that is not good for producing basins. The rejected material could still be changed to produce smaller items like faucet or drainage cover. If produced by workers into a defective basin, it will have totally no commercial value, plus it waste lots of labour & energy resources.

TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT

TQM(toal quality management) system is introduced in Lautus to make sure that the defectives are quitted from production line as early as possible, to save the cost.
All staff are involved in the quality, not only the QC people. Workers are educated that good quality is produced out, but not inspected out.
Each worker inspect the quality of material or semi-finish handed from last process. In case that the material is not up to quality standard, however, he did not let it quit from production line, and continue to produce, then he is the one that takes 90% of the responsibility, even though the defective problem may be created by last process.

TRACKING SYSTEM

Each product has a ID card going with it, passing from process to process. The ID card records the producing worker in each process & the production time.If customers do not have other requirement, we stick a unique number on the bottom of the basin. So when there is a problem found later on, we can find out the production ID card fast, and figure out what is the reason caused the problem, and how to correct them thus avoid similar problem in future.