The Quality Blog

QAI hopes that everyone had a safe and happy holiday weekend!

Discovering failure and acting on it has a 10 times cost savings impact – 1 dollar prevention equals at least 10 dollars savings.

Planning for quality is the key to success. A plan musty be written, based on whats new or changed problems in the past and Noise factors.

Our Brand New Website Is Up & Running…Take A Look! – www.quality-one.com

Is developing video clips for our newly designed website!

Is completely updating our website “www.quality-one.com”… new design, layout and videos! Coming soon!

Quality Associates International, Inc is NEW to Twitter today!

I just arrived in London this morning for an FMEA project and have to say the new seats on the delta (boeing 777) flight were quite nice. Almost fully flat and the beat the old northwest shell seats that i am used to.

I am writing this post with the just released news about GM and Chrysler dealership closings. What a blow. The Auto Industry has taken it on the chin lately as sales have been very weak and a few of the car companies even weaker. The good news is that the industry is finally taking steps to right itself, pretty late though.

My biggest fear is that while this is necessary, the industry as awhole as well as others that are feeling the strain are putting an extra strain on their quality and improvement processes. It seems we may have been lured back into the mentality that quality happens “sort of like the bumper sticker” but without difinative planning or drive. Lets face it folks, Quality is Hard….. Very Hard…. When we add people and tools to the equation without effective planning and delivery, all you get is check in the box forms with no impact on the product or for that matter customer perception.

Kudos to Ford for having some measure of importance to the quality journey. Keep an eye on the performance of Ford. Good things are happening.

Just  got back from the AIAG working group on Error Proofing. I have a couple of observations about error proofing. First, error proofing should be deployed on characteristics that are very important and have some level of risk. (Often outputs of FMEA’s) When the need for a characteristic is known, immediately the first course of action should be error proofing and then only after full consideration has been given to error proofing, consider statistical capability to an acceptable Cpk. level. Second, error proofing has to make sense. Cost and technology should be kept to the minimum and the main way to do that is to assure that the error proofing be implemented at the root cause level. This is the simplist and therefore most fundamental point of engagement. Keep it simple and least expensive, but it does require that the root cause level is known, not some intermediate problem description or control point….