Quality and application engineers are responsible for developing tests, detecting bugs, and defining processes for collaboration. This helps power innovation throughout your organization, but how do these professionals maintain the required high standards of quality? Here are quality and application engineering strategies used to meet standards assurance.
DMAIC (Six Sigma)
DMAIC, or define measure analyze improve and control, uses data to create strategy used for process improvements. It is one of the Six Sigma initiatives. Six Sigma provides organizations tools to improve the capability of their business processes. The goal is to increase performance while decreasing process variation to lead to defect reduction. This improves profits, employee morale, and product quality.
Define
Here, you define the following: problem, improvement activity, opportunity for improvement, project goals, and customer requirements. You need to define the focus, scope, direction, and motivation for the improvement team.
Measure
Next, you need to measure your processes performance. This includes capability analysis to assess your organization’s ability to meet product specifications.
Analyze
Then, you analyze your processes to determine why there is poor performance. What variations took place, and why? This includes root cause analysis (RCA) and failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) to uncover variation causes and process failures.
Improve
Also, you need to focus on improving process performance by eliminating the reasons why variations take place. What are the root causes? You can implement design of experiments (DOE) to solve these issues in complex processes.
Control
Finally, you control the improved process, and you make sure to look to the future. How can you replicate this for future process performance? You can create a quality control plan to ensure you maintain what’s needed to operate at the current level. Also, you can implement statistical process control (SPC) for monitoring process behavior.
Black Belt
Black belt quality and application Engineers learn diverse organizational functions, from operations and logistics to finance and production. The goal is to create well versed professionals in technical aspects who are team leaders. Certified black belt professionals help organizations achieve improvement in processes, reduce process variation, eliminate waste and defects through Six Sigma, and establish and define process capabilities.
Product Quality
Product quality is an innovative aspect of engineering and manufacturing. In fact, the term is still hard to define. As MIT Sloan Management Review argues the definition requires five major approaches, “(1) the transcendent approach of philosophy; (2) the product-based approach of economics; (3) the user-based approach of economics, marketing, and operations management; and (4) the manufacturing-based and (5) value-based approaches of operations management.”
As such, it’s not exactly easy to pinpoint the role of product quality. However, some commonalities that product quality strategies share are ensuring that production processes reduce variations to ensure standards assurance and identify bottlenecks in production level to maintain productivity. The goal is to make sure customers receive the same level of quality of products, regardless of where they’re located.
Continuous Improvement
Another quality and application engineering strategy is continuous improvement. Through continuous improvement, engineers are expected to establish and develop systems that ensure consistent production levels and standards assurance. Their work requires them to drive organizational optimized manufacturing processes for repeatable manufacturing designed to eliminate waste. They do this by analyzing current manufacturing responsibilities throughout the production process, and unlocking ways to improve processes.
Controls Planning
Finally, the last strategy is controls planning. Controls planning is documenting your functional elements of quality control your organization implemented to assure quality standards. This allows the process to be repeatable to eliminate variations.
Often, companies will include the review frequency of their control plan. In fact, the control plan will also have the history of the process capability measures, as well as verification the measurement system is capable.
We have found that these are the quality and application engineering strategies for our recent job placement of Quality and Application Engineers. If you are looking for the right candidate in this field, then Applied Resource Group will find the high-performing professionals your organization needs. Apply the right resources today!
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