The ideal and real - world dilemmas of an enterprise's quality production
In the business world, no enterprise will voluntarily design and produce products with unstable quality or products that do not meet the standards. After all, the goal of an enterprise is to make a profit, and inferior products clearly run counter to this goal. No enterprise is willing to engage in a losing business. High - quality products are the cornerstone for an enterprise to gain a foothold in the market and make profits.
However, reality often falls short of expectations. The problems that emerged in the previous generation of products seem to have been resolved on the surface in the next generation, but in fact, they still stubbornly persist. During the quotation stage, enterprises often estimate a relatively high product qualification rate and believe that they can make a profit. However, they eventually find that the qualification rate is extremely low, resulting in losses. During the trial production phase, there are numerous problems. Enterprises need to spend a great deal of time selecting suitable production lines and machines, and the production processes are constantly being modified and adjusted. This not only significantly increases the trial - production costs but may also lead to delays in the delivery time, affecting the enterprise's reputation and market share.
Drawbacks of traditional quality control methods
Although enterprises possess advanced quality tools such as DFMEA, PFMEA, QFD, DFA, and DFM, and also have experienced practitioners, managing quality information by relying on memory, paper, and Excel will always result in omissions. Once the experienced "veterans" in the enterprise leave, the situation will become even worse. These originally effective quality tools, due to the lack of experience inheritance, are like water without a source and a tree without roots, and it is difficult for them to play their due roles.
The necessity and functions of the quality knowledge base
To change this situation, enterprises need to solidify knowledge and build their own quality knowledge bases. Now let's take a look at what benefits a quality knowledge base can bring to enterprises.
Assist in R & D and market decision-making
When the R & D department is developing new products, it often asks the quality department about the quality problems and complaints of previous products. However, the staff in the quality department often find it difficult to provide comprehensive answers and can only recall and share some information from memory. Moreover, due to the frequent staff turnover in the enterprise, a lot of valuable knowledge and experience are lost as employees leave. Therefore, the enterprise needs a system to accumulate such knowledge and experience.
For example, a company plans to launch a new product in South America. By using the fuzzy search function of the quality knowledge base, it can learn about the complaints from Latin America, including the number of complaints, specific problems, and rectification measures. When searching for "South America + coffee maker", the system will show that the customer complaint rate in this region is much higher than that in Europe and North America. Further analysis reveals that it is because South Americans like to directly add milk and sugar to the water tank, which causes pipe blockages after heating. With this information, if the company wants to sell coffee makers in South America, it can place prominent signs near the water tank stating "Do not add milk, do not add sugar" to prevent problems in advance.
Similarly, the orange juice extractors with a globally unified design also faced a high complaint rate in South America. This is because during the design process, the main consideration was the usage scenarios of European families, where the machines are generally used by three or four people. However, South Americans are descendants of Southern Europeans and are Catholic. They like to hold large - family gatherings, and the local oranges are inexpensive. They use the machines as commercial ones, squeezing half a basket of oranges at a time, which naturally makes the machines prone to damage.
Looking at the Chinese and South Korean markets again, the motor burnout rate of the globally unified juicers in these two countries is several times that in Europe. After investigation, it was found that the reason is actually that Chinese and South Korean people use juicers too carefully.
In the Japanese market, after an enterprise changed its supplier, despite carrying out a great deal of quality assurance work, the customer complaint rate remained unchanged, but the sales volume dropped significantly. The reason was simply that the sealing tape on the product packaging boxes was not pasted neatly enough. The Japanese people believe that a company that can't even paste the tape well must have problems with its product quality, which brought huge economic losses to the enterprise.
These examples fully demonstrate that due to the lack of information flow among different product lines and R & D institutions, many problems occur repeatedly. The quality knowledge base can break this information barrier and enable enterprises to better understand the market and product situation.
Optimize production quotations and estimate the qualified rate
When a company quotes a price for a customer, if it has three production lines with different processing accuracies, it needs to know the pass rates of similar products on different production lines and the problems that are likely to occur. With the help of the quality knowledge base system, the company can get the answers within just two seconds, avoid doing unprofitable business, and also keep track of the enterprise's first-pass yield in real time.
Analyze the performance trends of materials and products
The performance of materials or products in many enterprises is related to factors such as time and temperature. Take the enameled wire in a motor factory as an example. Usually, calculating 30 CPKs is sufficient. However, if you want to understand the difference in process capability between winter and summer, manual calculation will be very troublesome. You need to calculate the CPK for each month separately and then conduct a comprehensive analysis. By using the quality knowledge base system, the computer can quickly present the performance trends across the entire time - axis within seconds according to different dimensions such as days, months, quarters, production lines, teams, and products.
Assist with product design and cost control
The quality system can also save money for enterprises. In injection molding production, the shrinkage rate of different types of PP varies between 0.2 and 2.5. Different structures, molds, and injection molding machines can all have an impact on the products. When designing products, designers often don't know which injection molding machine to choose and are also unsure whether the company has the production capacity. If there is relevant statistical analysis in the quality knowledge base system and the dispersion of similar products in different seasons can be found, designers can better control costs and select appropriate equipment at the beginning of product design, rather than blindly pursuing expensive equipment.
Precisely control the quality of materials
For enterprises with tens of thousands of material numbers, there are inbound material issues every day. Enterprises pay more attention to issues with high severity and safety concerns. However, due to the large quantity of materials, it is impossible to conduct a full inspection. Some minor issues, such as scratches and damaged packaging, even if missed during inspection, will not lead to major quality accidents. Through data statistics in the quality knowledge base, enterprises can avoid trying to solve all problems at once and focus their efforts on controlling key Class A issues, and analyze which materials and suppliers require stricter inspections. When SQEs provide quality guidance to suppliers, they can also pinpoint the main problems and improve the efficiency of quality improvement.
The gap between domestic and international quality systems and the quality attitude of enterprise bosses
On the US website , when searching for QMS-related products, there are more than 200 kinds. This indicates that there is still a gap between us and the United States in the construction of quality systems.
Some people think that bosses don't attach importance to quality, which is actually a misunderstanding. Excluding enterprises that deliberately produce fake products and violate laws and regulations, the vast majority of bosses do value quality. Bosses have to deal with numerous annoying issues every day, such as paying salaries, dealing with delayed arrival of raw materials, meeting customers' urgent demands for goods, dealing with excessive environmental pollution, facing difficulties in collecting payments, handling work - related accidents, and coping with employee turnover. It's impossible for bosses to know everything, be capable of everything, and do everything by themselves. Improving the enterprise quality management system, including building a quality knowledge base, is precisely where professional quality personnel can contribute to the enterprise and also their responsibility.