WHERE
The Sorting Centre is part of the Finnish Red Cross Logistics Centre. The Sorting Centre is located in Joensuu in Eastern Finland, near the Russian border.
The mission of the Logistics Centre is to produce logistics services to support international disaster relief operations. Its main tasks are:
- Equip and store field hospitals/clinics and maintain preparedness to deliver them to disaster areas at a very short notice
- Maintain material storage for disaster relief
- Carry out material procurement and deliveries to relief programmes maintained by the FRC around the world
- Produce good-quality clothing aid and deliver it to those in need around the world
The Sorting Centre sorts donated clothing to international disaster relief and humanitarian aid. The centre employs annually about 50 to 60 long-term unemployed, some of Russian origin, for periods of 6–12 months at a time. It receives and handles over 200,000 kg of donated clothes each year. It sends annually 100,000 kg (10 truckloads) of clothes bales to the Logistics Centre, which is responsible for delivery of Finnish Red Cross aid to international disaster relief.
Reward can be a good incentive to maintain standards
The Sorting Centre is organised into two departments: sorting (presorting, sorting, packaging and baling) and recycling workshop, which recycles the clothes that are not appropriate for international disaster relief.
The Sorting Centre employs only one person on a permanent basis, the manager. The manager is assisted by 4–6 supervisors hired with the support of state pay subsidy for a maximum period of one year. The supervisors work as heads of the warehouse and workshops and as quality controllers.
WHY
In the Sorting Centre, clothes are sorted into more than 40 different categories according to the International Red Cross directions, such as men’s winter coats, each placed in a rack of their own. Clothes accepted for international aid must be clean, in good condition and sorted into right category. The quality of sorting is even a more important performance criterion than the amount of clothes sorted.
The clothes bales are transported from the Sorting Centre to the FRC Logistics Centre, which checks the quality of bales by sampling. A whole truckload can be returned if there are too many quality errors. The uncertainties over quality could in the worst case threaten the continuity of the Sorting Centre’s operations.
HOW
The quality controllers monitor the quality of clothes sorted into international disaster relief, and train and guide the employees in the sorting department. Each category of clothes has a rack of its own into which the sorted clothes are placed. The quality controllers take a sample of typically 100 items of clothing from each rack in turn. They calculate the number of clothes not meeting the quality criteria and record the deviations into a follow-up table (Form for quality control by sampling (PDF)), e.g. the item has been sorted into wrong category or it is torn or dirty. The quality checking by sampling is conducted daily.
The follow-up table gives the total percentage of quality errors, which is reported to the manager of the Sorting Centre. The goal is to reach a level of less than 3% of errors, which is rarely achieved. Less than 5% of torn and dirty clothes is still an acceptable result.
On the basis of the observations made, the guidance, training, and instructions are focused on the issues that are most typically leading to quality mistakes. The daily percentage of quality errors is also marked on a flipboard in the staff coffee room so that the staff members can follow the development of quality of sorting.
Transferability
Quality monitoring by sampling is suitable to all work processes where standard products are produced and errors are possible. To be able to better respond to the errors, it is useful to categorise the different quality deviations.
Enclosure: Form for quality control by sampling (PDF)
For more information: Jaana Mäkelä-Peltonen, jaana.makela-peltonen(at)redcross.fi, tel. +358 40 5523953