Quality Management

Despite of proven immense impact on profitability, characterized with short payback periods and being recognized for its significance on the innovativeness and competiveness of a company, successful management of ideas is rare. An approach with prerequisites of a successful exception is the Corporate Capability Management (CCM) from Fraunhofer Austria. CCM is defined as the systematic and holistic approach to ongoing improvements on organization’s capabilities. The approach comprehends discrepancies between research findings on critical success factors and contemporary industrial practices.

The main goal of a company is to conduct target oriented rationalization efforts. Thus, the challenges are, among others, to transparence, to bundle, to adapt, to re-interpret and to develop personal and organizational competencies for a systematic and methodic planning, designing and implementing resp. a sustainable improvement of processes and value streams. This article describes the further developments of “Value Stream Mapping” (Value Stream oriented Process Management, Value Stream Mapping and MTM, evaluation of alternative value streams, cost development of value streams by changing input parameters). Existing, implicit knowledge will be explicated and systematically bundled along the value stream from different departments of a company. The personal and organizational system and method competencies are therefore available to evaluate improvement measures and to perform their implementation target oriented.

The view on quality as a critical competitive factor has been established not only in Western countries but is on the rise in emerging markets, too. In the complex of products and rising customer expectations, many companies try to reduce costs and increase the market opportunities for their products by applying broad-based quality initiatives. Normatively distinct quality management offers only few instructions for these approaches, which is constraining the success of the initiatives. Within the framework of an international study on quality management in manufacturing companies, critical success factors and best practices have been identified on the way to the sustainable establishment of effective quality management. On basis of a developed maturity assessment tool, companies are given the ability to identify the status of their own quality management in comparison to best practice.

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.

Against the background of complex and volatile value chains the success factor quality is gaining increasingly in importance. Today, product quality and process quality as well as their continuous improvement are the basis for entrepreneurial success. Thus quality controlling becomes a central function in order to assure competitiveness of companies. New approaches are in demand in order to fulfil quality requirements along value chains and in order to link quality management systems with quality controlling. By an inter-divisional and company-wide implementation of Quality Gates these requirements can be met.

Due to the increased product miniaturization, a number of new applications and market opportunities open up for mechanical micro-manufacturing. In the manufacturing process with part dimensions less than one millimeter and tolerances in the micrometer range occur so-called “size effects”. These prevent a simple scaling of processes known methods from the macro level and lead to an increased occurrence of quality deviations. In conclusion, the process capability according to ISO 21747 is affected and therefore the application of statistical process control (SPC) is more difficult. In this paper, the interaction between technical and logistical quality objectives in terms of logistical quality control are analyzed at the example of micro cold forming. Thereby, methods of statistical process control and fuzzy control are used.

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.