Quality in manufacturing

Manufacturing quality, unlike the general concept of quality we

sought to define above, is well defined in terms of attributes which are
associated toand required by a manufacturing process to operate in this
sense,quality is a characteristic and a requirement of the industrial
apparatus. Forexample, a factory floor with machines that break down
often, machinerythat is unable to operate at the required levels of
precision, or uniformityof operations, and general manufacturing systems
with a propensity toproduce highly heterogeneous quality products are an
expression of a,manufacturing unquality. Management of operations and
quality controlare thus the means used to 'produce' and control quality in
manufacturing.There may be several dimensions along which such
manufacturingquality may be defined, including:

(a) The propensity to maintain the manufacturing process in

control, i.e. operating according to agreed on standards of manufacture.

(b) The propensity of the manufacturing process to produce items

or products faultlessly.

(c) The propensity to maintain (and or reduce) the manufacturing

process variability, i.e. limit process instabilities by maintaining the
process repetitively.

Thus, agreed on standards, faultless production and repetitivity and

control I of variations are used to define manufactured quality. In
practice, I manufacturing quality is easier to measure 'negatively'. In other
words, it is a reflection of a negative performance (rather than a positive
one, which is, or should have been, the standard). As a result, the ideas
underlying the management of quality in manufacturing relate to the
management of the process and not to the design of the product. This
measure of quality is defined in terms of characteristics which are
important and related to the management of the manufacturing process. In
this sense, the measurement of quality is also an incentive for the control
of quality. Of course it is possible, Through appropriate integration of
both product design and the manufacturing process, to let one facet of
quality management (its conception and design) affect the other (the
process of manufacturing the product). Although this is increasingly
recognized as an important activity known as 'producibility' or
'concurrent engineering', it has not yet fully matured (albeit, it is the topic
of intensive research today). In a conventional sense, a process in control
would evidently results in products of a better quality than a process
which is not in control. As a result, by improving, the controls, we will be
able to increase the propensity to manufacture products of better quality.

For example, in the manufacturing of certain high precision

metallic items, there may be many objective attributes which could be
measured and tested for deviations from acceptable manufacturing
standards. These may include the location of holes, their sizes (which
often require extremely high precision), concentricity, symmetry, and so
on. These attributes are measured for the purpose of controlling the
processes which are used in making up a product! In other words,
measurements (tests) are made to detect causes of malfunction needed to
control the manufacturing process. For these metallic parts, there may be
many causes which contribute both to defective manufacturing or to
excessive variations from manufacturing standards. Lack of geometric
perfection, stress factors, materials stability, the ambient temperature,
lack of perfect rigidity, etc. may be some of these factors. The
measurement and detection of sub-standard performance | provides the
incentive for control and correction.

Thus, just as conceptual or design quality, manufacturing quality is

a complex concept which should be clearly understood before seekink to
manage it. A comparison of several aspects of quality are given in Table
1.1 to provide some further comparisons between manufacturing and
design quality.

Design quality Manufacturing quality

Durability Reliability
Esthetics Conformance to standards
'Attributes' desirability Process variability
Objective performance Consistency
Intangibles Tangibles

A manufacturer concerned with the production of quality products

or services uses various tools, statistical and otherwise, as we shall see
later on. Statistical tools are used in particular when uncertainty has an
important effect on the manufacture of quality. In such cases, poor quality
is usually produced due to variations and uncertainties regarding the
process operations and performance. When performance variations are
totally random, unaccounted for by any malfunction or cause, they reflect
a characteristic of the manufacturing process, the type of materials used
and the process at hand. When product quality or their attributes do not
deviate from a purely random pattern, the manufacturing process is said
to be out of control. In this sense, the management of quality in
manufacturing consists of determining departures from a state of perfect
randomness. As we shall see in Chapters 5, 6 and 7, techniques called
Statistical Quality Control(SQC) and Statistical Process Control (SPC)
are used to elaborate and apply tests of randomness of various sorts to
measure and predict departures from this state of perfect randomness.

The increases need to control statistical variations, and thereby the

need to control an manufacturing process and its environment, have been
ushered in by production concepts developed in the first industrial
revolution. These concepts, although complex and numerous, presume
that production, standards and producing up to these standard are
essential to guarantee the substitutability of parts used in a mass
production system. Taking responsibility away from workers and their
alienation at the beginning of the century in particular has led to the
necessity to control their work through work sampling and other methods
used to predict and manage the statistical variations which occur in
manufacturing. These basic tenets of quality management have recently
been.subject to scrutiny, motivated by a concern for a broader view of
quality management, a view which takes account of the whole
manufacturing distribution, service and business processes, and seeks to
produce quality rather than to control some process variations (although
this is also an important part of this broader view). This emerging
approach is called Total Quality Management. In addition, and more
recently, a 'quality trauma' has been ushered in by the increased power of
consumers, and by the fact that there can no longer be any justification-
economic, managerial and technological for producing poor quality.
^Japanese inroads into quality control techniques made in