The Quality Measurement Conference

This year’s conference focuses on measurement issues and measurement in manufacturing environments. The 12th annual Quality Measurement Conference will take place March 22-25, 2010 at Marriott World Center. The program will feature 45-minute presentations over 2 days plus multiple 1/2 day workshops. The Quality Measurement Conference seeks presentations and hands-on professional learning workshops about technology advancements, application case studies, and operational management concepts.



The 2009 Quality Measurement Conference included sessions about:
CMMs

• Gage Blocks and Gage Block Accuracy
• Measuring Castings and Forgings
• Quality in Practice at Lockheed Martin and American Safety Razor
• Quality Across the Supply Chain
• Measurement Uncertainty
• Statistical Process Control
• … and more.

Attendees want to hear about:

• Calibration
• Applications of Measurement Technologies
• Linear Measurement
• Thread Gaging
• Standards
• On-Machine Measurement
• …and other methods of using measurement, test and inspection effectively!

More about this event bnpevents.com

Toyota

Prius: Not built by Dilberts.

* GM and Ford can’t design vehicles that Americans want to pay “Toyota money” for. And this is not a matter of bad bets on product concepts or dumb engineers. It’s a matter of Toyota’s better engineering system, using simple concepts like chief engineers with real responsibility for products, concurrent and simultaneous engineering practices, and sophisticated knowledge capture methods. The Prius is not the result of a hunch or luck but rather the likely result of a development system that tries out many approaches to every problem, then gets the winning concept to the customer very quickly with low engineering cost, low manufacturing cost, and near perfect quality. (That’s not to say that Toyota can’t produce a dud — the first-generation Previa minivan and Tundra pickup stand out — but the likelihood of producing winners is higher than with traditional development systems.)



* GM and Ford are clueless as to how to work with their suppliers. Sometimes they try to crush their bones — which only works when the suppliers have any profits to squeeze, and few currently do. Then they embrace contentless cooperation that makes everyone feel better briefly but fails to produce lower costs, higher quality, or new and better technology. Toyota, by contrast, is getting brilliant results and lower prices from American suppliers like Delphi while also giving suppliers adequate profit margins. How? By relentlessly analyzing every step in their shared design and production process to take out the waste and put in the quality.

read full text on WSJ.COM

Total quality made much sense to Jack McGavigan, just retired, in his 80s, as chairman of John McGavigan & Co, founded by his grandfather in 1860. The family firm was a traditional printer, but developed from the Sixties into specialists in ‘graphics related plastics technology.’ Touch switches and backlit fascia panels in cars are examples of the uses. McGavigan, rightly keen on innovation, has constantly expanded into new technologies and product lines. Consequently, the group’s car parts have a 12% world market share.

None of this might have happened if McGavigan hadn’t reacted to impending crisis in mid-1987. Costs were rising, the company was being squeezed between strong suppliers and stronger customers, and competition was intensifying. The firm had been using quality circles for years – with employees banding together to tackle quality issues, Japanese-style, in a voluntary, bottom-up effort to improve. But more was needed to avert disaster.



Quality was the answer, passionately advocated by Edward Smith, 47. Managing director of John McGavigan Automotive Products, he joined the company as a stripling in 1963. ‘Employees are the experts’, he says. ‘We wanted to exploit the potential of people,’ which demands ‘training, teams and communication.’
read full text Thinking Managers

As a result, some experiments were entirely destroyed. One scientist had been working for 18 years on an experiment to measure the winds on Titan, and his data was supposed to be transmitted on channel A. But since somebody at NASA or the Italian space agency forgot to turn on channel A, none of that data was transmitted. And thus, 18 years of waiting was lost.

All of this reminds me of the fiasco that happened when NASA sent the rovers to Mars. When the rovers first got to Mars and started taking pictures, NASA suddenly discovered that, ‘Gee! The onboard computer memory is getting full!’ For some reason, when you actually take photos, it takes up memory. And after only a couple of days, the rovers were unresponsive because they were constantly rebooting due to the fact that their memories were full. It was as if no one had thought to actually test the rovers here on Earth before launching them into space at a cost of 800 million dollars.

So I have a question. Why do we as a nation spend literally billions of dollars to launch hardware into space when that hardware is being programmed and operated by bumbling idiots who can’t flip a switch or remember to test the hardware before launch day?

Of course, NASA always manages to put a positive spin on these events. The Mars rover missions were ultimately proclaimed a great success, but only because some sharp-minded system administrators were able to ‘hack’ the rovers from Earth with a process that reprogrammed the way the rovers store images.

Read more here

Quality assurance vs quality control

Managing quality on your project means that you must first understand the specific quality expectations of your customer and then put a proactive plan in place to meet those expectations. The “proactive plan” contains a number of elements — the most important of which are the quality control and quality assurance activities that need to be performed.

Quality control and quality assurance are important concepts, yet most project managers have only a vague understanding of the meanings and the differences between these terms. It’s actually pretty easy.

Quality Control refers to quality related activities associated with the creation of project deliverables. Quality control is used to verify that deliverables are of acceptable quality and that they are complete and correct. Examples of quality control activities include deliverable peer reviews and the testing process.

Quality Assurance refers to the process used to create the deliverables, and can be performed by a manager, client, or even a third-party reviewer. Examples of quality assurance include process checklists and project audits. If your project gets audited, for instance, an auditor might not be able to tell if the content of a specific deliverable is acceptable (quality control). However, the auditor should be able to tell if the deliverable seems acceptable based on the process used to create it (quality assurance). That’s why project auditors can perform a quality assurance review on your project, even if they do not know the specifics of what you are delivering. They don’t know your project, but they know what good processes look like.
Read more here

The development and implementation of process-control plans for the manufacture of threaded components is complex. Used in a wide variety of components from aerospace to automotive applications, the screw thread is one of the more difficult characteristics produced in general manufacturing operations. In many instances, the breakdown of process validation has its origin in the design phase. Incomplete product details and unrealistic tolerances are all too common.The net result increases production costs, extends delivery, and complicates the entire manufacturing process. As a manufacturer and designer of both standard and special inspection systems, our company is often required to manufacture special out-ofthe- box gaging solutions for unique requirements, when a simple design modification will permit use of standard off-theshelf gaging. Occasionally, complex designs coupled with excessively stringent dimensioning produce a part incapable of quality verification at any cost. The old adage “keep it simple” should be a design standard.



As products evolve from design to manufacture, the challenges increase. A first step in the development of a processcontrol plan is a complete understanding of the potential sources of variation. Unlike most manufacturing characteristics, the geometry defining the thread form defies easy solutions. Variation is not limited to change in the pitch diameter, but also to the interdependence of size and form variation as indicated by the functional size. Defined as the cumulative effect of profile variation, functional size includes the entire effect of thread-angle and thread-lead error on the pitch diameter size, and is related to the ability of a thread to assemble. In any control plan, it’s critical to control and minimize the difference between the functional and pitch-diameter size as a means of variability reduction.

Read more here