CONTINUOUS QUALITY IMPROVEMENT AND OPTIMIZATION OF DESIGN TOLERANCES USING DEMERIT SCORE SYSTEM

摘要

Continuous improvement is a concept that has gained wide popularity in every sphere of human activity in recent times and the area of production engineering is no exception. This is a far cry from ancient times when people were afraid or forbidden to innovate, usually under authoritative duress. Continuous quality improvement has been proven to bring in reduction in failure rates and cost of repairs. Quality improvement is not 'putting out fires' or 'identification and removal of a spike', but rather, it continually questions the existing systems and methods. This paper introduces a novel, inexpensive and practical tool for quality improvement, to be called 'demerit scores', or a system of negative weights that continually keeps tab on the production scenario with the objective to improve. This tool is useful for building robustness into the design by optimizing design tolerances for increasing productivity and reducing costs of production. The technique is illustrated with two examples in this paper.