A Quality Management Case Study Defects in Spacecraft Electronics Components

Project Management mainly entails managing all the nine influencing parameters so as to ensure a project that meets time and budget - a successful project. In the aircraft industry, quality is listed at the top of the list. Quite simply because the quality of construction of the plane is what brings it down, safely. Quality Management is all about setting some very high and strict standards and developing methods to achieve them. Quality Assurance is the evidence provided to establish confidence that quality-related activities are being performed effectively. Quality Control is developing evaluation schemes to ensure products are designed and produced to meet or exceed customer requirements. Any unit of production not meeting the standard is immediately eliminated. Researchers apply the Pareto principle implying that very few quality defects account for the larger quality losses. Pareto diagrams allow us to separate vital few factors that cause majority defects from the less contributing factors. Resources are then used to correct these factors and optimum quality standard is achieved.

This study examines for defects found during final inspection of printed circuit before they are integrated into the next higher assembly. Manufacturing process followed standards such as MIL-Q. It’s a standard written by the government used even by commercial enterprises. Whenever we have a defect cited, a discrepancy report (DR) is generated. The DR record keeps track of when what defect was detected by whom and where. It also stores information about what action was taken to restore quality unit. Defects are classified as types (In this study, there are 31).These broad categories are further sub categorized. In nutshell, this effort of planning quality is the essence is Quality Assurance.

Using the online DR system, Managers analyze defects. First, Managers find out the correlation between inspections and defects. Pearson’s coefficient is a valuable indicator of that.