Quality Management

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.

To compete in the global environment companies in high wage countries have to separate themselves from competitors from low wage countries by offering customer specific products and services. Due to the rising complexity of these products the steering of the corresponding production systems is getting more and more resource consuming. One way to handle this aspect is developed within the Excellence Cluster “Integrative production technology for High-wage countries” at RWTH Aachen University. Objective is the set up of production systems that are able to produce customer specific products at mass production costs.

The global players of the aviation industry are shifting a growing shares of their value added to their subcontracters. New subcontractors must do considerable expenses to get accustomed to the special quality and security requirements of the aviation industry. This can be done as an EASA approved production organisation or as an extended workbench. The decision orientates itself at the specific activities required.

The article describes the quality inspection of micro cold formed components in the collaborative research center 747 “micro cold forming” at the University of Bremen. These components, e.g. small springs in cell phones, are manufactured with a speed of up to 300 parts per minute in a micro cold forming machine. Overall dimensions are below 1mm. These dimensions lie in a field between tactile measuring techniques of form and position and surface metrology, e.g. roughness. Yet a high inspection rate is impossible due to problems in production engineering and metrology. Therefore, fast optical metrology, new evaluation methods and quality control is needed to ensure an economical manufacturing process for micro cold formed parts.

Due to increasing product complexity, quality, timing and resource constraints, the management of product development projects becomes more and more challenging. Especially the determination of current product quality, an indicator for the actual development status, is hard to accomplish. For this reason, the article presents a concept for a real-time quality estimation for products and intermediate results. The concept is used and evaluated in the semiconductor industry.