Quality Engineering & Management

Quality is all of the features and characteristics of a product or service that contribute to the satisfaction of customer’s needs. These needs involve price, safety, availability, maintainability, reliability, and usability. Price is easily defined by the amount of money to be spent for purchasing a particular product. The other needs are defined by translating the features and characteristics for the manufacture of a product or service in to specifications. Conformance of the product or service to these specifications is measurable and provides a quantifiable definition of quality. Therefore simply stated, quality is conformance to specifications and the degree of conformance is the measure of quality. From the view point of the customer, who has to use the product or service delivered to him, it is fitness for the use. From the manufacturer point of view, it is conformance to those specifications that would result in customer satisfaction ultimately. In very general terms, quality may also be defined as affordable excellence. Quality then is simply meaning the customer requirements, Now let us try to understand more about quality through the following definitions: Fitness for the purpose or useThe totality of the features and characteristics of a product or service that bear or its ability to satisfy stated or implied needsQuality should be aimed at the needs of the customer, present and futureQuality should be aimed at to meet the expectations of the customersConformance to specificationsQuality is not only to satisfy the customer, it should delight the customers We shall be dealing more about Quality Engineering aspects in this course. The course comprises of four Modules, Module 1 deals with Quality Systems. In this block, you will be introduced to quality control as well as concept of TQM. It is well known that happy people alone can produce outstanding quality. ISO 9000 standards are quality management systems, standards which are the bases for implementation assessment and verification of the quality system in the production as well as service organizations. The standards include a number of “Best Practices” which must be followed to ensure the effectiveness of the quality system. In the Module 2 Quality Tools-Statistical, we will be going to discuss more about statistical quality control methods such as capability index, various types of control charts and design of experiments. Statistical quality control is the branch of quality control. It is the collection, analysis and interpretation of data for use in quality control activities We shall learn more about other Quality Tools in Module 3 such as Quality Function Deployment, FMEA/FMECA, Cause and Effect Diagram and Reliability analysis. How the cause and effect diagram is more effective in identifying the root cause of the problem and it is also known as fishbone diagram for reducing the rejection levels in the manufacturing processes In the Module 4 Quality Management, we will be discussing about Implementation of quality systems in the industry, Cost of Quality and different case studies. The evaluation of quality management stimulated, at least in part, by the impact of the demand by customer for higher quality conformance levels and the increasing competitiveness in the market has resulted in the need to address quality management in all aspects of a business, including customers and suppliers. This development is known as total quality management (TQM). You will see by these statements that TQM is a philosophy and set of guiding principles for managing an organization.Course Credit: 4