QUALITY ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT IMPLEMENTS RELIABILITY THROUGH PRODUCTION CONTROL 630554

Managements of Corporations consisting of several Divisions are responsible for establishing Organizations in each Division that must institute Production Controls in Manufacturing and Assembly areas. These must be of such nature that Maximum Reliability will be achieved with respect to each Component, each Assembly, and each System. Incentives are described that awaken a competitive spirit with respect to final Quality in articles shipped among production workers. This Quality Consciousness is maintained in associated areas, such as the Receiving and Receiving Inspection Areas. Vendor parts and various procedures and techniques for gaining the wholehearted support of vendors in the procurement of parts within engineering specification requirements are presented in considerable detail. Vendor surveys, vendor rating plans, but chiefly close cooperation with vendors are among the tools that good managements employ to secure quality parts. Many cases are cited explaining and illustrating these principles.

Quality Management makes use of various forms of audits and evaluations to determine weaknesses and also to determine the progress of the various quality programs, the benefits of machine capability studies, the effects on quality of control charts at strategic points, the actual quality that results from each phase of the production operations, measures of internal effort, incoming quality, outgoing quality, the effectiveness of such internal audits, the actual results of various corrective action programs, and an overall quality rating based on the more critical items that have the most effect on the final quality of the product.

Quality Control and Reliability groups work closely with Production as well as with Engineering and Purchasing and many others. The establishment of economic standards of Quality for each and every piece part makes it possible to gain some slight insight into the cause of malfunctions and sub-standard performance. Station by Station controls with frequent analyses of quality and of actions taken to preserve aid foster the economic standards of quality make such standards meaningful. Close tie-in with Customer Complaints is achieved by feeding back through rapid data processing the various failure data together with an analysis and evaluation of such study. Value engineering techniques are applied with respect to rework and salvage operations. Controls over the replacement almost immediately of Returned Goods, whether the Customer is right or wrong, pays off and establishes a means for rapidly feeding back such information to Production to avoid repeating the same errors.

Cases are presented showing the effectiveness of these patterns of control in the Production Area. New techniques are presented that make such controls truly effective.