Quality Messages

The quality message system should detect all irregularities occurred in the production, at the customer, caused by the supplier or the own production etc. Then it should assign the irregularities to a causing process and assure process improvements by taking specific actions. All correspondence - internal, with the customer or with the supplier - is handled automatically if possible. Reoccurring failures are assigned to the causing process by an algorithm. For every complaint the costs are collected as an essential decision criterion for the containment action. Blunders of a supplier are stored in the receiving history and are concerned in the supplier assessment. The customer’s opinion about the own supply quality can be calculated fast. Because of the increasing impact of complaints concerning services these problems can also be captured.

Problem areas

• In-house complaints
• Complaints about deliveries
• Customer complaints

Typical quality problems

• Rejection messages
• Production interruption
• Customer complaints
• Material locking
• Program failure in controlling software
• Bad organisation
• Services failure

The QMS organisation

• Receiving the complaint, creation of a quality message
• Initiation of an immediate action
• Failure analysis
• Identification of the causing process (named quality process); all quality messages with a similar failure characteristic are assigned to the same quality process. The corrective action does not refer to a single quality message but to the quality process.
• Making a use decision
• Costing
• Efficiency control

Customer Complaints

A customer complaint can contain several single complaint positions.

Collected data about the customer complaint:

• Customer
• Plant address according to the basic data
• Business contact
• Entering a free customer address, e.g. for the intermediate trade
• Return address can be different than the customer address
• Kind of complaint (mail, by telephone etc.)
• Date of complaint
• Date of the first response
• Correspondence language

Complaint positions

• Failure location (installation, 0 km, production etc.)
• Material id (queried from the own material data) with engineering revision
  • Rejected quantity, redelivered quantity
  • Customer material id
• Production code, charge no. date of production
• Producer if it is a bought-in part from intermediate trade
• Pattern, request and supply date
• Customer inspection report, date of report
• Customer demands (new parts, repair, replacement etc.)
• Customer information (mail, 8D report etc.)

Reoccurring Failure, the Quality Process

A q-message describes a single failure. All messages belonging to the same causing process are assigned to the same quality process.

Typical reasons for reoccurring failures in the serial production are:

• The sample-based monitoring of a process is incomplete. Process variations can remain unrecognized.
• Failures that are hard to discover
• Influences of a charge, relations to specific operators etc.

Special significance of reoccurring failures of a quality process

• The customer has to be informed that the causing process will be improved.
• An 8D report refers to the process and is assigned to all reoccurring failures - even to those that are to come

A quality process can refer to the in-plant production or the production of the supplier. That means the data to be collected varies significantly.

Assignment of reoccuring failures to the quality process

Assignment criteria:

• Time-related restrictions
• Originator (self, supplier), different entries possible
• Originating production group
• Originating material
• Producer code, charge
• Failure group, defect mode
• Display of all quality processes that have the same entries in the criteria list
• Assignment by the user

Use decision

• Decision about the rejected material
• Accumulation of defective parts of all reoccurring messages
• Entry in the receiving history (delivery)
• Entry in the production history (own production)

Customer information

• Response to every customer complaint
• Decision if the complaint is justified
• Kind of the adjustment
• Offer for repair
• Complete 8D report
  • Failure analysis
  • Remedial action, appointments
  • Rating

Internal messages

In principle the only difference between internal messages and customer complaints is that internal messages refer to failures discovered in the own plant. The focus on the causing process is independent from the location of the discovery. The formalism (e.g. 8D report) can also be practised internally in acustic form.

Quality control

The initiation and execution of actions is fully supported by iQ-Projekte

• Initiation of actions
• Monitoring of appointments
• Automatic reminder system
• Capturing of evaluation reports
• Several overviews for success controlling purposes

Supplier complaint

• Informing the supplier (e.g. about immediate actions)
• Creation, sending of an 8D report
• Monitoring of appointments for statements, adjustments etc.
• Monitoring of the quantity of warnings
• Automatic sending of warnings in case of a missed deadline

Failure costs

The user can define any cost types (sort, crap, QM editing etc.)

QM documents

Assignment of several documents

• Scanned customer complaints
• Lock sheets from the production
• Statements of the supplier
• Automatic creation of documents by using a template

Support of the most popular business software like Word, EXCEL, Visio, pictures etc.:

• Creation of a new 8D report version
• Printing and sending of documents, e.g. via email

QMS history

Every processing step is registered.

Entries are recorded for every field.

Evaluations

The evaluation system contains a lot of single reports.

• Failure statistics
• Cost analysises
• Implementation of corrective actions etc.

Additionally there is a selection method that can be used to query many aspects of the quality control - from a rough overview (strategical level) to the detail (operative level). The evaluations are displayed using EXCEL. For this reason several statistics can be shown in one single worksheet.

The user can create own evaluations.