Quality Management

Need Due to:

• Increased competition – Local and Global
• Progressively higher demand for quality
• Shorter title cycle for product design and production
• Increased outsourcing – reliance on vendors and/or contractors

OBJECTIVE

• To produce product, project service that meets customer expectation.  These are determined by:

-          Legal or contract requirements

-          Competition

-          History

• Reduce cost of quality and consequently production costs
• Gain competitive advantage
• Enhance repeat business and customer recommendations
• Minimize legal actions due to unsatisfactory quality
• Improve short and long run profitability
• More practically obtain ISO 9000 certification since this is increasingly being demanded by customers

Recognition of the importance of good quality is indicated by the Malcolm Balridge Award which is awarded annually by the Dept. of Commerce to firms. Considered as having excellent quality programs

 Currently the quality management effort by management is described as

Total Quality Management.

 This is a comprehensive systematic approach to promote continuous quality improvement in an organization.

 Often this requires a cultural change in firms, making everyone aware of the necessity for good quality and motivating it’s employer to improve the quality of their work.

To accomplish this requires

-          Top management interest

-          Long term commitment

-          Appropriation of adequate funds and resources

-          Employee education

-          Utilization of quality improvement techniques and knowledge

-          An extensive record keeping and documentation system

-          Recognition and consideration of the people aspects

Steps followed to implement

1. Set up task force to plan effort and set goals
2. Measure present status
3. Identify and prioritize areas for improvement
4. Benchmarks, if available, can serve as goals
5. Form employee quality teams at the working level to make the quality improvements. They need:

·         Training how to do this

·         Availability of quality specialists for expert advice

6. Presentation of periodic progress reports
7. Management recognition and rewards for achievements

In TQM all Organizational Activities are included

-          Production

-          Engineering

-          Administration

-          Marketing

Major Management Decision

Should you hold product till completely bug/defect free

Or ship and make corrections when in use?

Decision considerations

-      Cost of non-conformance vs cost of correction

-          Loss of market share by waiting

-          Reputation

Basics of Quality Management

1. Quality is not free.  Decision has to be made what quality level to produce. Determinates are:

-          Market Research

-          Competition

-          Customer Requirements

2. Design Engineering has a major impact on quality due to the specification of:

-          Material

-          Tolerances

-          Features

-          Complexity

-          Packaging

-          Required maintainability & repair

3. Quality level of output is function of

-          Equipment in place

-          Process employed

-          Work force skills

-          Training done

-          Attention by supervision

-          Organizational culture

-          Accountability

4. Set up appropriate quality control plan.   Some considerations

-          Receiving inspection to monitor input

·          From outside vendor

·          From other inside departments

-          Prevention of damage to material and work in process

·          Careful Handling

·          Proper Storage

-          Periodic inspection to prevent continued poor quality output

Continuing work on defective products

Scrap & Rework

-          Utilization of testing equipment and degree of inspection integration with production

5. Keep adequate records allows:

-          Maintaining control

-          Improving quality levels

6. Across the board continuing management attention
7. Ongoing effort/research to improve quality of output and quality assurance system in place.

Types of Inspection – Considerations

No damage to product is permissible

-          Visual Inspection

-          Measurement

-          Go/No Go

-           

Damage to product

-          Destructive Testing

Customer Requirements

Cost and Resource Constraints

Unless 100% inspection is required

-          For safety

-          Cost of failure too expensive

-          Product is sold on that basis

Statistical Process Control is employed instead of 100% uses sampling to make decision about a population

Quality Economics/Cost

This information is utilized for:

-          Investment justification of outlays to improve output quality

-          Reduction in “Non Value Added” Quality costs

-          Definition of quality costs to concentrate on

Standard Procedure to reduce quality costs is to: 

-          Measure present cost of quality

-          Identify high cost areas

-          Change methods etc.

-          Do cost trade offs

-          See whether cost improvement occurs

-          In well run companies and this is in ongoing process

Practice is to look at quality costs in a systems basis that has the following components:

1. Prevention Cost- Those representing expenditures to prevent failure for example training, design review, prototyping facility readiness inspection, etc.

2. Appraisal  - Those representing outlay to check that product or service being produced meets the quality level desired. For example, receiving inspection, test equipment, testing and analysis of test data, audits, work in process inspection.

3. Internal Failure Cost- Those representing outlays made to correct defects in product/service before shipped to customer.  For example, rework and scrap costs.

4. External Failure Costs- Those that occur after product/service is in customers possession due to its poor performance.  For example, complaint investigation, recall, liability, warranty expenses and lost future profits.

 Internal and External Failure Costs

Results of Quality Improvement can be seen in:

·         Improved productivity

·         Lower production costs

·         Reduced cycle time

·         Better return on invested capital

For Example:

·         Quicker response to quality problems

·         Reduced scrap and rework costs

·         Reduced warranty and service costs

·         Lower work in process and material inventory

·         Lower labor costs- reduced overtime, less idle time

Specifically in reduced cost of quality

Quality Techniques, presently being employed

Purpose is to familiarize you with these.  Specialized courses in TQM, SPC, probability and statistics, quality assurance, maintainability and reliability are recommended to individuals interested in this subject matter in more depth.

1. Parato diagram- used to determine the most important/frequent quality problems from a total.  Done by categorization of these into a histogram.  Basis is expectation that 80% of the quality difficulties are caused by 20% of the production lines.

2. Time Series- can see quality performance trend over time say % rework required for a T.V. being produced.  Shows degree and whether progress is being made.

3. Cause and effect diagram used to identify (often via brain storming) what the underlying reason is for a cause, can be developed into many levels (i.e. what caused the cause). For example the effect is poor attendance at meetings.  Some possible causes not notified, held at inconvenient time, place, was scheduled without enough notice, did not consider competing meetings etc.  Next level would be what caused these effects.

4. Check sheet that requires routinized procedure to prevent overlooking certain number of checks and allows noting any concerns and who did it.

5. Statistical Analysis

1.      Scatter diagram to see if cause and effect exists and quality.   Relationship (i.e.quantity produced and number of rejects on a production line) 

2.      Histograms- Frequency profile outcome- can see degree of satisfactory and unsatisfactory performance (students coming to class on time, minutes ahead or behind).

3.      To determine expected level of output and degree of variation.   Can be seen from mean and variance (process capability assessment).

4.      Data from # 2 can be utilized to develop control charts to monitor performance and take corrective action when indicated.

Suggestion Box Systems

Ask employees for suggestions how to improve productivity, Often their rework (error) reduction for it to work employees must receive.

·         A positive acknowledgement for their effort

·         Prompt responsive with respect to the merits of their suggestion

·         A commensurate monetary and/or recognition award.

7. Quality Deployment Function

            Technique used to integrate customers needs (desired product features) into both the design of the product.  Also facilitates design comparison to competitor products.

Control Charts for Variable

X- Chart                       Used to record the variation in the average value of samples takes                                        over time in process.

R- Chart                      Shows the range (distance between the largest sample size and the s                                         smallest  i.e. 60, 64, 55, 58   R= 64-55 or 9 )

                                    Allows monitoring whether range becomes too large

Control chart for attributes

Attributes are used when quality cannot be measured on a production line.  (I.e. scratches on furniture, labels pasted on wrong or wrong labels, broken pieces of nnnglass in a set etc.)

Called P- Chart where p- np/n

                 P=  proportion of non nonconforming items in a sample

                 N= number in sample

              NP= number of nonconforming in sample