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Quality... Part II: a listening

© Dimitris Vayenas

Predictability is obviously elemental in quality products, if only to suggest that the customer/consumer will obtain an identical level of satisfaction time after time he/she buys or uses the product. This applies even to global food chains where the customer can taste anywhere in the world the same pizza or burger from the companies that apply stringent quality control procedures.

Control is another critical term when discussing quality. If the production process of any product lacks control then the product itself will vary.

Let us examine for a moment the meaning of the word product. Product arrives from the Latin word pro-ductum, which in turn arrives from the Greek pro-ion which describes "this that comes from somewhere/is an outcome of something".

Now let us limit this general discussion to engineering products. In a previous editorial, engineering was defined as the art of trade-offs. The apparent trade off is that between quality and price. Here we are going to explore the impact of this trade off during the manufacturing of the product, which obviously determines the value to the consumers.

The activities of engineering product manufacturing are comprised of the following five elements:
1. Product planning
2. Product design
3. Process design
4. Production
5. Service after purchase.

Please note that all elements "cost something" to the manufacturer and that is why the service after purchase is included on the list.

Our ideal supplier of the hi-fi system of our choice applies a company wide quality control system. The overall system must involve, the quality and quality cost concept through all phases of a product's life cycle (The life cycle begins with Product Planning and continues through the phases of process control , market development and packaging, as well as maintenance and product service.

From the consumers stand point, the value is received, that is, product quality is determined by the economic loss imposed upon us from the time the product was shipped from the factory. The engineering term for this is functional variation, the deviation of one of the products principal functional characteristics from the specified nominal value of the product design specifications.

For example, Product Design must specify tolerances that will not result in misfits or unnecessary production processes. Similar examples can be found in all phases of the product cycle life.

Ideally, an integrated system of overall quality control, in which all activities interact to produce products with minimum deviations from the target values, will minimize quality costs and make the most economic use of resources...hopefully giving the 'Best Buy' budge to that product.

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