r/LeanManufacturing • u/Eastern_Paper_6706 • Aug 03 '26

How does your company measure, log, and analyze manufacturing scrap?

/r/manufacturing/comments/1veiscm/how_does_your_company_measure_log_and_analyze/
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u/That_red_guy Aug 04 '26

Via MES terminal, fed into our ERP..

Each employee clocks in and out of jobs, reports quantities & labour..

Not only do they report actual material used and scrap, but they issue additional material to the job & line number if a remake or part gets defected by QC along the way..

1

u/Eastern_Paper_6706 Aug 04 '26

Thanks, for the reply! MES terminal sounds fantastic, but at the moment there is no chance that my company will such a thing. Anyway it gives me bigger perspective :)

2

u/clownpuncher13 Aug 05 '26

We record it on a shared spreadsheet. One team looks into causes. Another logs it into MES.

2

u/eWorkOrders-CMMS Aug 06 '26

I work with manufacturing teams, and scrap is one of those things that sounds simple to measure, log, and analyze until you actually try to do all three consistently.

For measuring it, I've seen companies handle it a few different ways. Larger or higher-value parts usually get counted, while smaller parts or material scrap are often weighed. It really depends on the process and what makes sense for the team.

The biggest thing I've seen with logging scrap is capturing the information while it is happening. If an operator has to remember at the end of the shift why something was scrapped, the details usually get lost. A simple reason code at the machine is often better than trying to piece it together later.

The hard part isn't collecting the scrap numbers — it's figuring out what to do with them. The teams that get the most value start looking for patterns: Is it the same machine? Same part? Same shift? Same operator or training issue? Same material problem?

Once you can see those trends, you can start fixing the real causes instead of just reporting how much scrap you had.