Abstracts
Integrated product quality management using Product Lifecycle Management Solution: A case study
Sankaran Munuswamy and Anandbalaji Sundararaman, TCS Ltd., INDIA
Product Quality is the key to success of new products and sustained demand for existing products. Quality products impact top line and bottom line performance of the organization enhance brand image and create barriers for competition. Many organizations struggle to achieve superior quality due to shortening Idea to Market cycle time and continuous expectations to reduce product costs. Organizations address this issue through several quality initiatives such as DFSS, First Time Right, KAIZEN, TQM, etc.
Introducing superior quality products requires managing the product quality right from concept stage through retirement integrating various information, people, processes and system. Product development process has the rigor of collecting voice of customer, capturing quality characteristics as product requirements, managing potential risk in the product through FMEA, establishing measurement system analysis and quality control plan in manufacturing and processes for continuous improvements through methods like CAPA. Cross functional team needs to utilize outputs from these processes to make design and manufacturing decision. However inability to access and communicate consistent quality information results in quality issues during product introduction and post launch. In organizations with globally dispersed teams, supplier and partners this problem gets multiplied due to disintegrated processes and systems.
This paper discusses how to establish a systematic and integrated quality management approach in the Product Development process to deliver superior quality products at optimal cost using Product Lifecycle Management Solution (PLM).
