The Future of Quality Tools Webinar

Several trends will influence business. For this presentation we are looking at three specific ones, and their impact on quality management and quality tools. The first trend is digitization, not just of business processes but also of society at large.

A second trend is speed of change and reduced product life cycle time and linked to this a reduced time to improve a product after it has been released to the market. The third trend is the continuous increase of intelligent automation through Artificial Intelligence (AI) and self-learning systems.

The trends described above have several consequences for quality management and quality tools, but there are two high level effects that will have an overall impact. The first one is a shift from correction to prevention. As a concept this is not new within quality, it is one of our basic beliefs, but the time has come to put this theory into practice.

Quality will have to focus much more on the design and development of new products rather than on the running production of existing products. Techniques like Quality Function Deployment (QFD), TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) and FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) will gain in importance. Actually, companies relying on continuous improvement through the correction of failures will see that there may not be enough time to continuously improve within the short lifecycle of a product.

Ever faster reaction to reports of non-satisfied customers will be a requirement. Customers will want a quick fix for their individual problem and root cause analysis may just take too long. A root cause analysis can be done later with the intention to use this as an input for the next design and no longer as an improvement for the current product.

Malfunctions will be spread through social media, affecting the reputation of your product. With the abundance of competitor products available, who would buy yours once the word is out that “there are problems with it”? It will be necessary to react on a minor incident to avoid huge consequences.

Along the same lines, also within operations more energy will have to go to prevention than to correction. This means quality needs to be implemented into the design of the process and tools like Poka-Yoke will increase heavily in importance. We will need to build processes that operate fault free without human intervention. 

This brings us to a second high level effect: the shift from an operator controlled to an intelligent machine controlled environment. As we shall explain further this goes beyond production processes. Intelligent machines that have been designed for prevention of failures will no longer be operator controlled but engineering monitored. The vital part is the machine that needs to operate perfectly and continuously.

Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) will play a part but only if more emphasis is put on applying it in the process design stage. In addition, a fundamental technique like SPC (Statistical Process Control) may become obsolete.

Automation will also effect the design process. A first example is the Design for X -technique where X can be manufacturability, serviceability, ease of assembly, etc. As a control tool (does our design meet all X-requirements?) this has already largely been taken over by CAD systems. But with Artificial Intelligence the software will actually be making the detailed design itself with an optimization beyond the capability of human designers. Just like an operator no longer makes a part, a designer will no longer design that part. 

The clue to success will be in the way an organization captures the voice of the customer and understands the functional needs that are expressed, turning that into product and service ideas. We need to go further upstream to find the ideas for future success in cooperation with our customers.

We will also need to check how delighted customers are with the products and services that we came up with to satisfy their needs. 

There are some clear trends that will influence society, organizations and the quality management within these organizations. As a whole they are sometimes referred to as Quality 4.0 or Manufacturing 4.0. 

Quality tools for continuous improvement have always formed an important part of quality management. A lot of money is spend in training operators, quality engineers, quality managers and others in a couple of basic techniques. But the question is if these techniques are really the ones that will be needed and useful for the future?

In this presentation we will evaluate the consequences of digitization and other trends for some of our basic quality tools. All important changes create winners and losers. The same will be the case for quality tools: some will gain in importance, others might get extinct and many will need to change in the way they are used or in their area of application.

It is vital to focus on the right things to be prepared for the future and to avoid spending money on tools that are bound to become obsolete. 

Areas Covered in the Session:

• Important trends in society with impact on business and quality management
• Consequences for quality management and quality tools
• From correction to prevention
• From operator controlled to machine controlled
• Tools with a future
• Voice Of the Customer (VOC)
• From VOC to Design Goals
• From correction to prevention at all levels Concluding remarks

Who Will Benefit:

• Quality Engineers
• Quality Manager
• Operational Managers
• HR managers (seeking training)