Defect Catalog
The defect catalog is the fixed list of faults your inspectors can record. Fixing the list is what makes the numbers worth having — free text produces twenty spellings of the same problem and no way to rank them, while a catalog produces a ranked list of what is going wrong most often, on the Overview and on every report.
A catalog entry
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Code | A short identifier, such as SCR. |
| Defect | The name inspectors see, such as Scratch. |
| Category | Groups related faults — Appearance, Dimensional, Packaging. |
| Description | What counts as this defect, such as Scratch on the surface. Worth writing: it is what stops two inspectors classing the same fault differently. |
| Severity | Critical, Major or Minor. |
| Inactive | Retires the entry. Existing records keep it; it stops being offered on new ones. |
Where defects are recorded
- On an inspection, as rows of defect and how many were found.
- On a non-conformance report, the same way.
Every row needs both a defect and a quantity — a fault recorded without a count cannot be ranked against anything.
What the counts drive
| Where | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Overview | Defects found, most first — the ranked list for the period. |
| Quality Inspections report | Defect analysis alongside the inspection detail. |
| Supplier Quality | What each supplier's failures actually consist of. |
Keeping the list short
A catalog of four hundred entries is as useless as no catalog at all — inspectors pick whatever is nearest the top and the ranking becomes noise. Start with the faults you already talk about in production meetings, use Category to group them, and add entries only when a real fault has no home.
Severity here is the defect's own class. Criticality on an inspection plan is the class of a check. They are related but separate: a check can be critical while the defects found against it vary in severity.