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'Total Quality Management and Zero Defect'

The application suite Visual Factory provides electronic Visual Work & Quality Instructions™ for higher assembly process and product quality, reduced rework, and rapid capturing of actual quality indicators. It also integrates several interactive applications, from Product Metrics & Quality Traceability Portal™, with lot & serial number traceability and tracking, to comprehensive product documentation - creating New Dimensions for Lean Total Quality Management.

Value Stream TQM - The Key to Lean

High supplier material quality, however, is not necessarily guaranteed, and only early identification of quality issues and their source ensures smooth production processes and higher product quality. In the past quality issues identified during the manufacturing process were usually handled in two ways:

Either the worker had to fill out quality issue reports, a time consuming effort, or material was just thrown into a “rejected material’ bin, to be picked up later, possibly many hours later. Valuable actual quality information was lost; and potentially this had a severe impact already. If more than just a couple of materials were defect, quality issues could not be recognized fast enough, and may have resulted in material supply issues, and even assembly line stoppages.

Visual work & quality instructions enable the worker to report quality information such as actual measurements, checklists, and quality issues of assemblies and materials with a simple point & click directly in visual instructions. For the worker it may mean only ‘one more’ defect material, reported quickly in one second, but for Total Quality Management it is much more:

Pro-active TQM Monitoring™ applications pick up this information, and pre-defined TQM Flex Limits™ are checked in the background. The application may identify that this was not the first or single material defect, but one among several in this shift already. If this represents a certain critical percentage, it requires quality action and follow up. TQM Flex Limits can be pre-defined according to your individual needs and the TQM Escalation Management™ submits quality issues to personnel and management who need to know. Issues below a limit of ‘0.5’ percent may not represent a real issue and is only ‘statistics’, ’0.7’ percent may be already important for the quality department, ‘1.0’ percent may potentially cause material supply issues already, and at another predefined percentage the line manager or the supplier should be informed about critical quality issues, automatically and immediately.

For more information and download of corresponding language fact sheets in PDF format, please click here:

For downloads and fact sheets of other process solutions and application areas, please click here.

Release 4.1 - 09/10/2004