Quality Management Tools QM0013

ASSIGNMENT – Set 1
Name: Kanchan M. Ghatnekar.

Registration No. : 571118549

Learning Center: International Institute of Business Management.

Learning Center Code: 03237

Course: MBA.

Subject: Quality Management Tools

Semester: III

Module No. : QM 0013

Date of submission: 14/02/2013

Marks awarded:

Directorate of Distance Education

Signature of Centre SikkimManipal University Signature of Coordinator

Signature of Evaluator II Floor, Syndicate House
Manipal- 576104

Kanchan M.Ghatnekar Roll No. 571118549

 Quality Management Tools QM0013
Q1. a. Explain the need of Quality Management Systems in an organization.
List any two advantages of Quality Management Systems.

Ans: Quality Management System is defined as A set of corresponding activities to direct &
control an organization in order to improve the value & efficiency of its performance. The
system of QMS aims at achieving success & customer satisfaction through embedding an
awareness of quality through business, planning & feedback. The main aim of the QMS is
the professional relationship between the customer & supplier working together for mutual
profit. In order to understand complete QMS each process should be studied in details due
to which it will improve quality of products & reduces wastage, rework. With improved
quality of products & services customer requirements can be achieved.

QMS ensures two vital needs:

(i) The customer’s needs: QMS ensures that customers implied needs are severed
.i.e. it ensures how capable the company is in delivering the desired products &
services without fail & meet customer’s needs & expectations.
(ii) The organisation’s needs: This ensures the products are developed with minimal
cost by using existing resources such as tools, technology, people & data.

QMS enables an organisation meet the goals & objectives set out in its rule & procedure. It
gives uniformity & fulfilment in terms of methods, resources, equipments, people. It co-
ordinates all activities of the organization starting with meeting the requirements of the
customers & finishing with their fulfilment. QMS are required in all types of organisation.

Advantages of Quality Management systems are:

(i) To build quality into products this leads to customer satisfaction. If quality of
products or services are improved taking into consideration the requirements of
the customers & are fulfilled the customer will be then fully satisfied.
(ii) To help boosting the confidence levels of team members. It creates a cheerful
workplace and shows respect for humanity through QC circles with all member
participation.
(iii) To improve corporate health & character, to upgrade quality & to increase
profits.
(iv) To decrease wastage on the products.

Q1 (b) Describe Quality Assurance and Quality Control in brief.

Ans : Quality Control also referred as QC is the operational techniques & activities that are
used to fulfil requirements for quality.

 QC is a process of maintaining standards & not of creating them.

 It involves in examining products, processes & services.

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 It prevents undesirable deviations from the planned quality of the products or
service being supplied.
 QC includes not only fixing the defects of products, services & processes but also the
employee issues such as skills, performance & compensation.
 When QC is referred to employees, it requires immediate corrections & solutions.

Quality Assurance also referred as QA is the planned & systematic activities implemented
within the quality system to provide adequate confidence that product or service will fulfil
requirements for quality.

 Basic purpose of quality assurance is to remove the cause of error and to prevent
occurrence of the error & defects.
 QA means to assure quality in a product so that a customer can buy it with a
confidence & use it for a long period of time with confidence & satisfaction.
 QA helps to improve & stabilize production & other components of the processes to
avoid or minimize issues that led to defects.

Q3. Quality Function Deployment has been widely regarded as a breakthrough in the quality
function. Discuss. What are the different phases of Quality Function Deployment?
Ans: Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a standard approach of defining customer needs
or requirements & translating them into specific plans to develop products to meet those
needs. By implementing QFD an organization can improve knowledge, productivity &
quality, reduces costs, product development time & time spent on costly engineering
changes.
QFD focuses on customer requirements i.e “Voice of the Customer”. QFD is a scientific
technique for translating voice of the customer into technical characteristics in development
of product or services. It is a complete product planning process. QFD is a customer driven
planning process which guides through the design, manufacture & marketing of the product
or services.
QFD is used to translate requirements of customers into engineering specifications.
 It focuses on customer expectations or requirements & is often referred as the voice
of the customer.
 Translates customer expectations into technical characteristics.
 Enables the design phase to concentrate on the customer requirements & thereby
spends less time on redesign & modification using traditional means, thus saving
development cost.
 Helps identify new & quality technology & job functions to carry out operations.
 Provides previous references to enhance future technology & prevent design error.
 Defines a process for developing products or services as it is the most developed
practical process & a planning tool.
 Performs competitive analysis which leads the company to find ways to sustain in
the competitive world. This analysis improves performance measure of the
company.
 Provides a way to set targets. Engineers use the data to focus on product design
features. Improving product quality using market strategies & operations is crucial.

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 Quality Management Tools QM0013

There are four important phases of QFD they are product planning, design process, product
& production planning & delivery. Each phase is discussed below:
(i) Product Planning: In this phase a detail study & research of the market has to be
carried out. This process identifies solutions that provide the desired competitive
advantages without violating any expectations. Evaluation includes a description
of the expected technology needs for the new product. Evaluation of
competition involves market survey, competitor analysis, planning of measure
that have adopted in providing customer needs relative to competitors & finding
similarities & differences between competitor & the organisation’s own product/
services.
(ii) Design process: This phase involves comparing engineering characteristics &
customer requirements. Based on the result, product characteristics are
identified & designed.
(iii) Product & production planning: This incorporates process design operations,
process flow, production planning & quality evaluation checks with respect to
requirements.
(iv) Delivery: This phase involves shipping, distributing & servicing the products.

Q4. Discuss the steps used in the construction of a House of Quality.

Ans: House of quality is a graphic tool used to define the relationship between customer
needs & the features of the products. House of quality is a part of quality function
deployment & it utilises a planning matrix to relate what the customer wants & how a firm
meets those wants. House of quality is a method to transform user demands or
requirements into technical specification that is implied in product designing & production.
The house of quality matrix tool is generally incorporated in the process of prioritising the
complex engineering tasks.

The House of quality matrix is the most accepted & widely used form that translates
customer requirements based on marketing, research & bench marking data into a
appropriate number of engineering targets. While constructing the House of quality one
should take an account of some points like metrics has to be complete & dependent
variable. It should be practical & include popular criteria & are to be compared with the
competitor’s product that is available in the market place.

Following are the steps to Construct House of Quality:

Step1 : This step is to identify & list down the customer requirements about the product or
service. The customer requirements are determined through personal interviews or by
bringing together many customers for a discussion. The gathered data is organized &
evaluated using simple quality management tools like affinity diagrams & tree diagram. This
is then documented in customer requirement part of House of quality matrix.

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Step 2: This step is to list down technical descriptors i.e list all technical features that are
necessary to meet the customer satisfaction. The technical descriptors are qualities or
characteristics of the product or service that are measurable & are benchmarked against the
competition. New measures can be created to ensure that the product satisfies the
customer needs. This identification of the measurable characteristics of the product is
carried out by QFD team.

Step 3: In this step a relationship matrix is established between the customer attributes &
the technical features. Matrix ensures that the final technical features are adequately
recognised & that it it meets all the customer attributes. Lack of any strong relationship here
may result in failure to meet customer needs.

Step 4: Level of expectations of the customers about the features of a product is decided. By
taking care of design features of these high expectations market value is added to the
product. Te QFD team has to identify important interrelationships.

Step 5: In this step evaluation of the organisation’s product and that of competitor’s product
is carried out. This is done through reverse engineering and other process improvements to
achieve a competitive edge over the competing product or service.

Step 6: This step is to develop prioritised customer requirements & technical descriptors
like:

 Ratings of the relative importance to customer

 Target value
 Scale up factor
 Absolute weights
 Relative weights

The final step is to identify the features & product characteristics that have a strong
relationship with the needs of the customer. These characteristics are to be deployed in the
design & production processes to ensure that attributes satisfy the original voice of
customers.

Q5. Define FMEA- Failure Modes and Effects Analysis. Describe the different types of FMEA.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of FMEA?
Ans: Failure Modes Effect Analysis is a means of identifying or investigating potential failure
modes & related causes. FMEA is a simple & powerful procedure to use & look ahead &
eliminate probable failures. It is used for identifying potential failure modes & to determine
their effect on the operation of the product & identifying actions to lessen the failures. A
successful FMEA activity helps to identify potential failure modes based on experience with
similar products and processes or based on common physics of failure logic. It is widely used
in development and manufacturing industries in various phases of the product life cycle.
Effects analysis refers to studying the consequences of those failures on different system
levels. There are four types of FMEA they are:

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(i) System Level FMEA: It is the highest level FMEA that can be performed. It is used
to identify & prevent failures that are related to systems or sub systems in the
early design concept stages. The system level FMEA is performed to validate that
the system level specification minimizes the risk of functional failure during
operation.
(ii) Design level FMEA: This is used to identify & prevent product failures that are
related to the product design. Design level FMEA can be performed on a system
level sub-system level or a component level design proposal & is intended to
validate the design parameters selected for a given functional performance
requirement.
(iii) Process Level FMEA: This is used to identify & prevent failures that are related to
manufacturing or assembly or for a family of components or assemblies
(iv) Functional Level FMEA: This focuses on the planned function or use of a
component or subsystem.
Advantages of FMEA are:
 Improves the quality reliability & safety of a product or a process
 Improves company image & competitiveness.
 Increases user satisfaction
 Reduces system development timing & cost
 Helps to collect information to reduce future failure & capture engineering
knowledge
 Reduces the potential for warranty concerns.
 Identifies & eliminates early potential failure modes.
 Emphasises problem prevention.
 Minimises late charges & associated cost.
 Medium for teamwork & idea exchange between functions.
 Reduces the possibility of some kind of failure in the future.
Disadvantages of FMEA are:
 FMEA is effectively reliant on the members of the board which examine product
failure. Hence it is limited by their experience of previous failures.
 External help is needed from consultants when a failure mode cannot be identified
who are aware of the different types of product failure.
 It is not able to determine complex failure modes involving multiple failures within a
subsystem. It is also not able to report expected failure intervals of particular failure
modes up to the upper level subsystem or system. The multiplication of the severity,
occurrence & detection rating may result in rank reversal, wherein a less serious
failure mode receives a higher Risk Priority number than a more serious failure
mode.

Q6. Explain the methods of measuring Reliability. Discuss software reliability

Ans: Reliability is defined as the probability of a device performing its purpose adequately
for a specified period of time under specified operating conditions encountered. It is the
capacity of a device or system to perform an essential function under stated conditions for a
specified period of time.
There are different methods to measure reliability they are failure analysis, strength testing,
stresses testing each of these are discussed below.

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 Quality Management Tools QM0013
 Success Failure model: In this method the product or device has to operate for
specified time under specified conditions. The possible outcome of this experiment
can be recorded as simple Success or Failure. This experiment is extensively used to
know the actual function of a system or a part of the system before freezing the
design. A simple example that uses this approach is the operation of limit switches.
 Failure Model: In this method the device or product is experimented under specified
conditions until failure of the device occurs. The outcome is noted as the time at
which the failure occurs.
 Weibull Failure Model: In this model the actual shape of the failure rate
characteristic is determined. Here the failure is not independent of age but is a
power function of time.
 Strength & stress Model: This is an alternative approach to obtain the estimates for
the success failure probabilities for mechanical parts are through the use of strength
& stress distribution. To avoid failure the strength of a part is designed to exceed the
applied load. The traditional approach is to achieve the necessary balance of load
strength parameters through the use of safety factor.
 Accelerated Life test Model: This type of model is used to obtain timely information
on the reliability of simple components, materials & to provide early identification &
removal of failure modes thus improving the reliability. ALTs have become
increasingly important because of rapidly changing technologies, complicated
products with more components, the pressures for rapid new product introduction
& higher customer expectations for better reliability.

Software Reliability: It includes all parts of the system ie. Hardware, software, operators &
procedures. It is a unique phase of reliability engineering. Now a day’s software has turn out
to be a critical part as the technology is becoming digitalized. There are significant
differences in software & hardware behaviour. In case of hardware most of the unreliability
is due to the electronic components used in the system. The system can be restored by just
replacing the component and the system may perform as per the intended function, but the
same is not in case of software failure. In this case it is due to unanticipated effects of
software operations. Small software programs can have large combinations of inputs &
states that it is not feasible to systematically test for each input combination. Restoring
software to its original state only works until the same combination of inputs & states
results in the same unintended result.

Kanchan M.Ghatnekar Roll No. 571118549