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This is the first in a series of blog posts digging deeper into the seven keys to building a quality culture, which builds on Nicole Parker’s recent introduction blog. In this article, we will discuss the first of these seven keys.

Design Quality from the Start

Employees want to design the best products for their customers, so why do we still have quality issues? I argue it is a management enablement issue requiring involvement of the right employees, giving them proper tools and processes and most importantly, the environment to be successful in the up-front design to eliminate and minimize quality problems. There are 4 aspects to ensure we design quality from the start.

  • Designing for extreme prevention
  • Leveraging knowledge from the past
  • Managing the new product introduction process
  • Incorporating the supply chain

Let’s talk about each of these and discuss the tools, steps, and environment that can enable them.

Design for Extreme Prevention

The term “extreme” is used to compel employees to take prevention to another level. It pushes them out of their historical norms of prevention and gets them to think beyond how they think today. It means we need to gather our brightest, most experienced, and most skeptical minds together as a powerhouse team to identify all the design considerations before design starts. We will discuss teams in further detail in a future blog, but “who” is involved is very critical to success.

The goal is to design prevention of any failures. These are not just failures an end-user might experience, but failures in processing, procurement, assembly, maintainability, serviceability, sustainability, etc. Rarely does a single person understand all of these areas, much less more than a couple of them. We need those perspectives up-front.

Customer requirements and how the product will be used should be reviewed, then concerns and design considerations of all stakeholders should be documented so they can be addressed by the design team as requirements. Then, the design team can define design failures/risks to understand the important, critical, and reasonably likely risks and to mitigate those risks within their design. Next, the design team can design the product before those designs are formally validated against all of the customer and internal stakeholder requirements and risks.

Leveraging Knowledge from the Past

The “powerhouse” team has a wealth of knowledge and experience, so their involvement can save untold future costs or quality issues. Having business systems that will help document and effectively utilize that knowledge are invaluable. The obvious benefit is to stop repeats of past problems, but less obvious benefits might include any of the following:

  • Efficiency – building a library of design failures/risks for different types of systems can be leveraged in future designs for similar products.
  • Retaining Intellectual Property – the knowledge in employees’ minds is not leverageable if it is not documented, should they be retiring baby boomers or younger employees not likely to stay with the same company as long.
  • Making Systemic Improvements – design improvements from one part number, through library-based failure/risks, can help facilitate the same improvements in existing and future products.

Managing the New Product Introduction Process

Successful launch of a product doesn’t simply mean the sound design of the product, it also includes how the product is built and tested, defining the bill of material, deciding what materials/subcomponents are made vs. purchased items to meet capacity and cost objectives. It also includes managing suppliers’ quality – we will discuss this more later. Managing these aspects of new product introduction has a big impact on achieving good first part quality and sustaining that quality. Having processes and systems are crucial to enabling the team to manage the risks of new product introduction. Without that efficiency that work will only be cursory or not be done at all.

Similar to the design phase we discussed, now that we know what we need to build vs. buy, process or manufacturing engineers can determine how best to manufacture the parts by determining process flow, identify the failures/risk for each of those processes and ideally determine how they will prevent those failures. When prevention is not possible a plan to at least be able to detect the failure is necessary. It is encouraged to determine process characteristics (machine speed, torque, temperature, etc.) that will ensure and prevent a quality problem. Measuring product characteristics is almost always too late, value has already added to the bad part if the check fails.

Incorporating the Supply Chain

The quality of the supply chain determines the quality of the product. This is why it is crucial to make the right sourcing decisions not solely based on quoted price. During the RFQ process, it is important to be able to pick the supplier based on the best quality, delivery, expertise for that item, price, lead-time, etc. or quality, either perceived or real, will suffer. Without a system to help administer the RFQ and sourcing process, it can take too much effort and sourcing will likely go to the current supplier base, providing little leverage or improvement.

All aspects of supply chain interactions can impact quality. In the design phase, it may be important to review requirements with suppliers so there are no misinterpretations. During supplier development, incorporate the supplier into the NPI process and have them begin sending validation documentation as they develop their parts/materials so problems can be headed off before they put your timing or overall product quality at risk. Communication and the relationships with suppliers should be no less than it is internally. We are also seeing the Amazon effect on customer expectations for delivery, so quality and supply chain professionals are going to have to learn from each other to vastly improve delivery performance.

Building a culture of prevention and design for quality will require more work up-front for at least the first couple of new products, but it will lead to the preventive culture that will dramatically reduce the cost of quality over time. The rule of 10 tells us that for every department a quality problem progresses through, it will produce a 10x increase in the cost of the quality problem. Investing in up-front quality will improve margins much more than cleaning up the problems after they are present.

Feel free to download and share our “7 Keys to Building a Quality Culture” infographic below.

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