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.

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.

Due to the global harmonization of product quality it is essential for a firm’s success to pursue a quality strategy that balances the trade-off between customer satisfaction and quality costs. For selecting an appropriate quality strategy it would be necessary to include risk considerations and customer satisfaction into strategy evaluation approaches. However, current methods do not integrate these customer related effects. This article presents an approach for calculating the value added by quality strategies integrating risk considerations and customer satisfaction as a major success factor.

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.

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.