Monday, July 27, 2009

Top 10 Trends in Quality

Since we are on the topic of pictures and videos, I thought it would be a good time to talk about emerging trends in quality.
Most trends including those emerging in quality are driven by technology and making use of intelligent systems to get accurate information quickly.

We live in the world where abundant data/information is available and users have little time to look at it.
The challenge is to present data in formats that are easy to understand in a short span of time.
These are the key factors driving the trends that are emerging in quality

Based on our experience in the manufacturing industry, the top 10 trends in the field of quality are:
1) Use of Real time systems in Quality is increasing
2) Quality practitioners need accurate data presented in the form of charts
3) Charts should be designed to tell them the story of their process and product quality in a few minutes
4) Practitioners need to be alerted about problems in real time
5) Quality Engineers have to generate reports for customers and management. Systems should have an easy way to create reports as and when required.
6) Managers and executives need color coded dashboards that tell them about the quality of the parts that are being produced/shipped, overall process capability, production losses, downtime etc.
7) Quality professionals analyze data for finding root causes of problems. They need to slice and dice the data many different ways. Systems should allow them to do this in every possible way
8) All information/reports/analysis should be available on the web. That way quality practitioners can access this information from anywhere in the world.
9) Tracking and correlating data about quality throughout the supply chain should be possible.
10) Information should be available not only on PCs but also on mobile devices like phones, PDAs