Quality Management

The growing importance of knowledge in product development processes is followed by the urgent need to manage the quality of implemented knowledge management strategies in the process. All sorts of companies have been implementing knowledge management activities in their daily routines, either or not they are aware of it. This paper introduces a model to measure the maturity level of knowledge intensive business processes, which is adjusted to the needs of small and medium enterprises (SME). A set of success factors and their indicators were developed to help identifying the as-is process situation and plan improvement measures as well as a web-based self-assessment tool.

The capturing of a customer’s needs and ideas and their subsequent incorporation into the features of a new product or service are central challenges of the product development process. Meeting these challenges successfully will guarantee long-term customer satisfaction with a new product or service. It will also ensure customer loyalty and repeat or generate new orders. However, it is essential that product developers have an awareness of a customer’s needs and actually take them into consideration in their concepts as product characteristics and types. Since competition is often very intense, even the most individual customer needs have to be given as much consideration as possible by applying differentiation and diversification strategies.

In aviation anonymous incident reporting systems (IRS) have been set up for decades to reduce or to control operational incidents and risks systematically. The aim of such instruments is to fall back on existing knowledge of the employees in order to optimize operational performance. The system can only be successful in the long run, if anonymity and non-punitivity are guaranteed. Moreover, the company requires a constructive error culture.

Continuous attempt for improvement as well as the permanent impulse to explore and eliminate failures and flaws belong to the classical quality mindset, which is also reflected in CIP approaches. However, it is often difficult to systematically identify improvement potentials with minimal expenses, especially in knowledge intensive business processes. A purposefully combined disciplines and instruments of quality management, process management and knowledge management enables the development of a maturity model adjusted to the needs of SME. This maturity model, based on the methods of CIP, serves to uncover the potentials in the knowledge process. The following contribution demonstrates the development, application as well as the value of employing the quality-oriented maturity model for knowledge intensive business processes.

Due to increased customer requirements the product quality has become a precondition for the competitiveness of manufacturers. Fundamental for the production of top-quality products are stable and error-free processes. The basic process configuration takes place during the factory planning. If substantial quality related standards are not taken into account at this time, essential modifications could only be realized during the subsequent factory operations with a significant additional effort. Therefore a methodical approach for the planning of quality supportive factories which early integrates the relevant requests in the planning processes is developed at the Institute of Production Systems and Logistics (IFA) of the Leibniz University of Hannover.

The quality of a product can be described with the fulfillment of requirements. Requirements of a product are derived from customer requirements, laws, technical, economic, normative and organizational requirements. To achieve profit for a product all of the requirements have to be specified exactly to calculate the effort and with that the correct prize of the product. This goal can only be achieved if all necessary information is implemented in the product and process specification before the documents are signed. Advanced product quality planning will help to provide the information completely, in time and up to date at the right place. This complex task presumes the implementation of a computer-aided quality information system. The experience of the implementation of a computer-aided information system for a medium sized enterprise will summarize the paper.

The quality endeavors of an organization, like other enterprise activities, must be oriented towards the economic principles. This approach give way to many organization to question the extent to which the quality management contributes for the overall business success and to pin point the areas where particularly a high value can be created in order to attain the maximum possible economic benefits out of QM-Systems. Without including the answer of this question in the decision making process, the resources can not be allocated optimally for the quality purpose. The following illustration depicts how the quality-based activities generate the value to enhance the performance and a variety of indicators reflects how they indirectly add value to an organization and hence contribute to its economic success.

Metrology supplies valid information about the production. Utilized in control loops metrology often is the enabler to a capable production. Benefits in terms of a contribution to the production’s value added is generally unknown. This paper answers the question how the use of or investments in metrology can be rationally justified - not only on the basis of a cost minimization, but as an assessment of production performance due to measurements. A decision-theoretical model comparing the deployment of metrology with compared to an abdication of measurements enables the necessary quantification of the benefits. Embedding the decision model in quality control loop shows that the feedback of measurement information leads to a considerable process improvement.

Quality in the production ramp-up significantly affects the success of new product introductions. At the same time the number of restarts in producing companies grows with more divers and specific customer requirements and less vertical range of onsite manufacturing. The resulting complexity is difficult to manage and often leads to quality issues. This article tackles the problem by focusing on quality aspects of the ramp-up management. Based on a holistic understanding of quality the authors present „PAM“, a model for production ramp-up. PAM structures the highly complex topic of ramp-up management and at the same time represents all relevant interdependent elements. The model provides a basis to systematically improve quality in production ramp-up.

Over the last two decades quality management has been shaped by a plethora of concepts for performance-focused quality design, ranging from six sigma, TQM, EFQM, Sustainable Quality Management to ISO 9000- certification and the Kano model. None of these mainstream models fully meets the requirements of navigation capacity, viability and balance. The balanced resilience concept provides a realistic approach for an integrated management of quality risks and opportunities. Establishing barriers to failure and dismantling barriers to success serve as key elements of the concept.