Quality Management
Being involved in the new product development, it is important to know that the quality of a product is one of the major characteristics for the customers to consider while choosing one of the available options. Managing the quality must be one of the most challenging processes during all the stages, including the development and the production itself.
Quality management is what most of the managers, who are responsible for the product development and production, should know. It ensures that some particular product (or service, or even an organization) is consistent. Quality management has four main components, which are quality planning, quality improvement, quality assurance and quality control. Being focused not only on either product or service quality but also on the available means to achieve it, quality management uses both quality assurance and control of the processes and products in order to achieve the needed quality.
Quality assurance is one of the ways of preventing either defects or mistakes, or both, in manufactured products. It helps avoid the most popular mistakes, as well as problems while delivering the services and/or the solutions to the customer. Being a part of a quality management, quality assurance is focused on providing the needed confidence that all the needed quality requirements can be fulfilled.
The mentioned defect prevention may differ in quality assurance from defect rejection after its detection in quality control, being referred to it being focused on the quality that was earlier in the process.
Pic. 1. Building the House of Quality
Both of the "quality control" and "quality assurance" terms can be often used for referring the ways of ensuring the needed quality of a product or service. Thus, the term "assurance" can be often used as an implementation of inspection as well as the structured testing as a measure of quality assurance.
Quality assurance is known to be comprising the procedural and the administrative activities that can be implemented in a so-called “quality system”. Such processes have to lead to the goals and requirements for a service, activity or product to get fulfilled. Being the comparison with a standard, the systematic measurement, monitoring of the processes as well as an associated feedback loop, conferring the errors’ prevention, quality assurance can be contrasted with quality control, which is known to be focused only on the process output.
There are two principles, included in the quality assurance: "right first time", meaning that the mistakes should be eliminated, and "fit for purpose", meaning that the product should be suitable for the intended purposes. Also, quality assurance includes such processes as managing the quality of assemblies, products, components, raw materials and services that can be related to production, management, production and inspection.
Being involved in the quality function deployment and so in the House of Quality and quality management activities, you may face the need of creating the House of Quality drawings, such as the HOQ diagram or HOQ matrix, for example. The cells of such matrix table have to be filled with the weights that should be assigned to the stakeholder characteristics where the characteristics are affected by the system parameters across all the top of the House of Quality matrix.
At the very bottom of the HOQ matrix, the column is summed. Doing so allows all the system characteristics to be weighted due to all the needed stakeholders’ characteristics. All the system parameters are known to be uncorrelated to any of the stakeholders’ characteristics as they may be unnecessary to the system design, being identified by the empty matrix columns. At the same time, stakeholder characteristics are identified by the empty rows, being uncorrelated to any of the systems’ parameters, indicating the characteristics which are not addressed by the design parameters.
All the system parameters, as well as the stakeholder characteristics with some weak correlations, are known to be potentially indicating the missing information while those matrices where there are too many correlations can indicate that the stakeholders’ needs may need to be refined at some point.
Creating the needed matrix from a scratch may be a challenge. Although there are all the needed tools available for any ConceptDraw DIAGRAM user from the House of Quality solution from ConceptDraw DIAGRAM you can still try to make the needed drawings using no templates or design elements, but if there is a need for completing the tasks on time, then it is always better to have the pre-made samples as the drafts for the unique and great looking diagrams.
Pic. 2. Quality Management solution
Thus, the so-called “Building the House of Quality” or “House of Quality” example from the House of Quality solution of ConceptDraw STORE may be a useful tool for using it as the drafts for making the smart as well as the professionally looking drawing. Also, there are such pre-made templates as the “House of Quality Correlation Matrix”, “House of Quality Customer’s Competitive Assessment”, “House of Quality Diagram”, “House of Quality (HOQ)”, etc., available for all the ConceptDraw DIAGRAM users to be edited and changed the way they have to.
Among other pre-made examples there are “House of Quality Interrelationship Matrix”, “House of Quality of Buses”, “House of Quality Prioritized Technical Descriptors”, “House of Quality Scheme”, “House of Quality VOC vs Technical Requirements”, “QFD House of Quality”, “HOQ Matrix”, “HOQ of a Handlebar Stem in a Bicycle”, “House of Quality 9 Step”, and a choice of two QFD Matrices.
