Business Core · Manufacturing Operations · Module
Quality management
Ensuring output meets specification, and finding out why when it does not. Detection is the fallback; prevention is the work.
The idea
How it works
Inspection sorts good output from bad; it does not create good output. An organisation whose quality depends on inspection is paying for defects twice — once to make them and once to find them.
The cost of quality is usually understated because failure costs sit in other budgets. Rework, scrap, warranty, expedited shipping and lost customers rarely appear on the quality line, which makes prevention look expensive by comparison.
Working with it
In practice
- 01
Move controls upstream
A defect prevented at its source costs a fraction of one caught at the end.
- 02
Measure process capability
Whether the process can meet the specification consistently, not whether today’s output did.
- 03
Find root cause, not the responsible step
The step where a defect appeared is rarely where it was created.
- 04
Cost quality fully
Prevention, appraisal, internal failure and external failure. The last is the largest and the least visible.
One level in
The components of quality management
A component is something that exists afterwards which did not exist before — a deliverable or a mechanism, not an intention.
External failure cost — warranty, returns, lost customers — is the largest quality cost and appears on no quality report.
The other modules in manufacturing operations
Capacity planning
Matching what can be produced to what will be needed, over a horizon long enough that capacity can still be changed.
LearnProduction flow
How work moves through production — batch sizes, queues and handovers — and where it spends time without being worked on.
LearnMaintenance
Keeping equipment capable of producing. Planned maintenance is inconvenient; unplanned maintenance is expensive and arrives at the worst moment.
Learn