Quality management in mass production: specifics, requirements, opportunities

Today's series production can no longer be compared to the mass production of days gone by. What impact do these changes have on quality management today?

Today, companies can mass-produce products under significantly different conditions than in the past. They have installed innovative handling and measuring systems, flexible production control enables new variants of manufacturing. In addition, more and more customer-specific requirements are finding their way into series production. Quality assurance still plays an important role in industrial quality management.

What forms of quality assurance are appropriate for these new types of series production? Do methods and philosophies of the past still prevail or has a new age dawned? Quality assurance is, by definition according to ISO 9000, a part of quality management that is directed towards the fulfilment of quality requirements. Quality assurance still closely attends to the products and the necessary production processes.

Continuity in philosophies and methods

At least some constants can still be identified in quality assurance. The basic philosophies in series production are not much different today than they were a few years ago. Lean management, zero-defect concepts or worker self-inspection, i.e. delegation of inspection responsibility to the production workers. These approaches still dominate half to three quarters of quality assurance procedures in practice. In the rest of the companies, one finds the Six Sigma or Poka Yoke approach as well as Total Quality Management philosophies. Quality assurance methods are also not subject to drastic change over time. However, some methods have been discarded by practitioners because they assess the cost-benefit ratio unfavourably. There are no universally valid rules of thumb for determining which philosophy and which method are to be preferred. This is due to different processes in manufacturing and development, complex products, the organisation of companies, to name but a few.

Networking and data evaluation

A revolution in quality assurance in series production can be discerned neither in methods nor in philosophy. However, there are trends that can be identified. Testing and measuring technology continue to develop, supported and accelerated by automated data processing. However, there is still potential for optimisation. The networking of the individual systems is still not perfect, and there are still isolated solutions that are not compatible with each other. Quality management and quality assurance still seem to be moving further and further apart.

Quality assurance in the company organisation

Where quality assurance is located in the organisational context of the company is decisive for assessing the development. It is not uncommon for quality assurance to exist beyond the quality management organisation. This phenomenon can be observed especially in manufacturing industrial companies. The explanation for this is that some manufacturing companies in industry have special organisational structures. Often quality assurance is not integrated into a quality management department. Many manufacturing companies have already created staff units for quality management for some time. These QM units have strategic tasks and report to the corporate management. Quality assurance units for production sites then work separately from this. For many decades the prevailing opinion was that production and quality assurance had to be separate from each other. No dependence, that was the supposed golden rule. But this rule conflict with the developments of today. Today's productions are flexible, lean, fast, highly networked. For this reason, quality assurance should be located very close to production.

Trends in quality assurance

In principle, the tools of quality assurance have already been developed. Methods and philosophies obviously outlast the decades. Nevertheless, two developments can be identified. Testing and measurement technology continue to automate, and the requirements for networking and evaluating the data generated in the process are increasing at the same time. In quality assurance, too, data is the gold of the 21st century, without a doubt. The use of this eminently important raw material will undoubtedly become even more important in quality assurance.

Quality management and quality assurance are likely to become more distinct in the future. QA will probably be more integrated into the manufacturing process again in the future. Testing and measuring technology will be even more automated in the future. Quickly networked with all the information of the required systems in the company. This will make it even easier to exploit high-quality data. It can be used to develop better quality products and to control production. There will also be a trend for quality assurance to be integrated more and more intensively into the research and development department and the manufacturing organisation. Quality assurance in manufacturing companies will emancipate itself from quality management and become its own discipline.