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| Quality Management Services for Manufacturing Industry | |
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Glossary APQP - Advanced Product Quality Planning. A quality framework to develop new products, particularly in the automotive industry. The output of the process is a quality plan that will support the development of a new product that will be of the quality required by the customer. CED or CEDAC - A Cause and Effect Diagram (with the Addition of Cards), also known as an Ishikawa Chart. A way of examining the critical paths and focusing quality improvement efforts on areas of the process that are critical to quality. DPMO - Defects per Million Opportunities - a measure of the error rate per million opportunties. The aim of quality improvement is to minimise this, and so reduce costs. DRIVE - Define, Review, Identify, Verify, Execute. Refers to a Total Quality Management tool that is an approach to problem-solving and management. It can be used to facilitate onging process improvement. FMEA - Failure Modes and Effects Analysis. A system of identifying and categorising reliability problems with a product early in the development cycle, and identifying means of improving reliability. This is a system of analysis of how a product may fail, and identifying key actions to reduce the level of product failures. ISO9001 - This is a set of standards, revised in 2008, around which a quality management system can be implemented. There are several inter-related standards that cover quality management systems, management responsibility, resource management, product realisation and monitoring, analysis and improvement. Full information is available on the BSI web site. PPAP - Production Part Approval Process. Part of the APQP (see above). A process to ensure that outsourced components comply with the quality specifications, that this is documented, and that this quality is maintained throughout the life of the product. Root Cause Analysis - A system to ensure that the root cause of problems in manufacturing and engineering (and other ares, such as health and safety) are identified and remedied. The system goes deeper than finding out what happened and how, and asks why it happened, and develops practical systems to put in place that ensure the problem will not recur. Six Sigma - This is a complete system of quality management originating in the USA, but now becoming popular in the UK. The name comes from statistical process control, where the aim is to ensure that the outputs of a process are all within six standard deviations (represented statistically as a sigma) of each other. That would be either three standard deviations from the mean (or average) in a process that has upper and lower limits, or six standard deviations from the mean (or average) in a process that has only a single upper or lower limit. The aim of the system is to ensure to minimise the outputs from the process that fall outside these limits, and also to reduce the level of variation (i.e. to reduce the size of the limits) so that quality is improved. It is not just a statistical technique or to do with manufacturing technology, but a whole system of management, with its own training, certification and accreditation. SPC - Statistical Process Control. Methods based on statistical analysis used to identify problems with a process and thus enable the problems to be isolated and managed. Can also be used to monitor effects of changes in process management on quality. SPC Charts or Shewhart Charts - Charts produced as a result of statistical process control methods providing an easy visible method of identifying quality issues. SQA - Supplier Quality Assurance. Management of quality in an environment where much of the process is outsourced to other suppliers. SQA personnel manage quality in an environment where they will be working with multiple suppliers. TQM - Total Quality Management. A system of management that is focused on quality at every level of a process, from top management and strategy, through individuals who carry out the process, and the technology. The aim is to ensure that the product delivered to the customer is of high and consistent quality, and to have a system whereby this quality is continually improved. |
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