We all know that quality isn’t free. But if you want to pay for it at the lowest possible cost, you build quality in from the beginning.
When you identify a quality issue during production, you’ve already invested in that nonconforming product. You’ve got to decide whether to scrap it or invest more money in reworking it to reclaim your original investment. Worse still is when a defect goes undetected until it’s out in the marketplace — not only are you paying to correct the issue, you’ve taken a major hit in customer satisfaction and brand reputation.
As I mentioned in a recent article in Quality Digest, prevention is cheaper than playing quality catch-up. So why doesn’t everybody do it? Because designing quality from the start requires a combination of the right employees using the proper tools and processes in a corporate environment that teaches, expects and fosters investment in the upfront design process.
Here are five key strategies for designing quality from the start, along with the tools, steps and environment needed to make it happen.
1. Design for Extreme Prevention
Extreme prevention means exactly what you’re imagining: Taking prevention to the next level. It starts with gathering the brightest, most experienced — and most skeptical — minds together to brainstorm all possibilities before the actual design process begins. This means involving stakeholders from across the company, including engineering, manufacturing, procurement, quality, maintainability, serviceability and sustainability, plus key suppliers. And don’t forget those senior operators, who likely know more about the process than everyone else.
Remember, the goal here is prevention. You naturally think about potential product failures that end users might experience, but don’t ignore possible problems in the design, manufacturing and supply chain processes.
Empower your design team with reviewing and documenting customer requirements and stakeholder concerns, then creating a comprehensive list of requirements. Those should include all aspects of the product’s life cycle, including dimensional characteristics, performance, durability, assembly, maintainability, serviceability, sustainability and sourcing.
Next, the cross-functional team should define the failures and risks of the product and process design so those can be resolved before production even begins. By addressing these risks upfront, the team can design the product and the manufacturing processes to prevent failures before they even occur. Victory!
2. Leverage Knowledge From the Past
One of the best ways to prevent quality issues is to learn from previous missteps and successes. By gathering and using knowledge from past projects, your team can avoid repeating the same mistakes.
Documenting this knowledge is crucial for retaining intellectual property and facilitating future design improvements. For example, having witnessed the failures of using Excel to manage foundational failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), Ford Motor Company requires suppliers to document and maintain a foundational FMEA using a software tool — that’s how much the automaker values documenting institutional knowledge of failures and risk.
Documenting that knowledge does the following:
- Reduces the risk of losing everything inside your subject matter experts’ heads if and when they leave your company.
- Drives standardization — the FMEA and risk data come automatically from an accumulated database.
- Improves efficiency — your team doesn’t have to remember or rediscover those risks.
- Increases effectiveness of the risk analysis — your team is freed up to focus on finding yet-undiscovered risks.
Take PennEngineering for example. Recognized as the go-to fastening resource for virtually every industry from electronics to aerospace, the U.S.-based company knew it needed a standardized quality management solution to facilitate communication, increase visibility, and automate processes as it added manufacturing and technical locations around the world.
Prior to implementing QAD’s Enterprise Quality Management System solution, PennEngineering lacked visibility into how a supplying plant was dealing with quality issues, with no standard for corrective action. Once the company launched QAD EQMS at 11 plants across the globe, they were assured that all locations were sharing best practices, and saw an appreciable decline in customer issues.
3. Manage the NPI Process
A successful product launch doesn’t simply mean designing a sound product. It also includes how the product is built and tested, defining the bill of material, deciding which materials and subcomponents will be made and which will be purchased to meet capacity, and cost objectives.
New product introduction (NPI) also includes managing suppliers’ quality. Managing these aspects of NPI has a big effect on achieving good first-part quality as well as sustaining it. Relevant and reliable processes and systems enable the team to manage NPI risks.
It’s crucial that the systems specify the three Ws — what, who and when — along with notifications and escalations based on these three. Humans need reminders and visibility to be efficient, coordinated and stay on track. Without those capabilities, the work will only be cursory or, worse, not be done at all.
Look for NPI systems that allow you to establish your own project templates. There should be gates made up of several tasks that require approval for milestones, and checklists to ensure that less-experienced people are fully completing tasks to expected levels.
Once the product design is complete and you know what you need to build vs. buy, the manufacturing engineers can determine how best to manufacture the parts by determining process flow, identifying the failures and risk for each of those processes and — ideally — determining how they will prevent those failures in production.
When prevention isn’t possible, a plan for detecting possible failure is crucial. Determine process characteristics — such as machine speed, torque and temperature — that will ensure product conformance and prevent a quality problem.
Where there is a good correlation between process characteristics and their associated product characteristics, you should continuously monitor those process characteristics so you can adjust before nonconforming product is produced. When measuring product characteristics, look for elements that are trending toward their control limits so you can adjust before you’re out of control.
4. Incorporate the Supply Chain
Your customers’ entire experience with your products is limited by the performance of your worst supplier.
Knowing that, it is essential to make the right sourcing decisions based on factors such as quality, delivery, expertise, price and lead time. During the RFQ process, it’s important to pick the best supplier based on these factors and not solely on price. Effectively vetting prospective suppliers is extremely important because it’s a high-risk event. Once you have a supplier established, it will be important to conduct periodic audits or have suppliers do periodic self-audits.
During NPI, supplier part approval is often treated as an event. It’s not. Supplier part approval is a process. Instead of approving everything in one event, you should be incorporating the supplier into your NPI process to avoid an expensive surprise at the end of the project.
Look for a system that allows you to integrate your suppliers within your NPI process so you can request certain deliverables through the development phases. This allows you to check the supplier at critical points and, if necessary, make course corrections. You should view your suppliers as an extension of your staff — or they won’t be!
5. Cultivate a Culture of Prevention and Quality
Designing high-quality products requires upfront investment and effort, but the price of quality over the life of the product will be dramatically reduced. It requires trust, discipline, education, collaboration, awareness, cross-functional teams and ownership on all levels.
It all comes down to your organization’s culture. You’ve got to provide the right employees with the proper tools and processes to create an environment that fosters success. Cultural change can rarely be accomplished without conspicuous executive leadership, reiteration, reinforcement and accountability checks.
By following these five key strategies of designing quality from the start, you can eliminate quality issues and deliver products that meet customer needs and exceed expectations while paying the lowest possible price for quality.
