Manufacturing Quality | Siemens Software

At its most basic level, manufacturing quality is conformance to specifications. Quality of design and conformance to specifications provide the fundamental basis for managing operations to produce quality products. As customer expectations have risen over time, manufacturing quality has come to be an absolute requirement, regardless of where products are manufactured, distributed, and sold. Assuring manufacturing quality entails three principal functions: quality design and engineering, quality control, and quality management.

The goal of quality engineering is to incorporate quality into the design of products and processes, as well as to predict potential quality problems prior to manufacture and delivery of the product. The principal task of quality control involves enforcing the use of specified processes and materials, ensuring qualification of operators and equipment, and making a series of planned measurements to determine if quality standards are being met. If any of these are not achieved, then corrective action and future preventive action must be taken to achieve and maintain conformance. Quality management involves the planning, organization, direction, and control of all quality assurance activities. While quality control departments have historically provided technical support for manufacturing quality, manufacturers have come to understand that quality must be integrated throughout the enterprise. 

The cost of poor manufacturing quality is high. Rework, scrap, product failures and recalls can severely damage a manufacturer through inefficiencies, delays, direct costs, customer dissatisfaction and low shareholder confidence. Today manufacturers must build products on time, first time and every time to achieve and maintain competitive standing in global markets.