Introducing Cleanliness Requirements in Industrial Production

Abstract: Problems with quality are the cause of significant avoidable costs for manufacturing companies. One such problem is cleanliness. Reviewing relevant literature and observing state-of-the-art facilities, this study attempts to find out how manufacturing companies should work with cleanliness in order to increase the quality of their products by looking at the different components of a cleanliness system. The literature review shows that there are some fundamental aspects to cleaning that are important to understand in order to work efficiently with these issues. Moreover there are a great number of methods and procedures for achieving and measuring cleanliness available and the most important ones have been described to provide an overview of the options that can be used. Finally an examination of the typical parts of the production chain of an industrial manufacturer has been done in order to see the relationship between them and cleanliness. It turns out that cleanliness is a comprehensive issue that must saturate the entire organization for success to be possible. Only when involving each part of the production chain can the goals of cleanliness work be achieved. Furthermore, many factors go into the cleanliness of acomponent and establishing its required cleanliness level must be done empirically.