As we have seen, an organization is achieving design quality when the engineering product it creates can be effectively used by downstream organizations. Many practices developed for quality in manufacturing can be adapted for use in design quality assurance. How software tools can help The most effective way for a manufacturing company to address engineering design quality is to implement a complete program of automated quality assurance. The aerospace company previously discussed used PrescientQA software to determine the exact nature of its data quality problems and the cost burden of ignoring them. The quality software allowed the organization to quantify improvements and set a program for the future.
Engineering design offers companies a whole new arena within which to apply quality practices.
The first step is often a quality audit. When the aerospace company performed a quality audit of its design process, it discovered that 50 percent of the errors found in the design data would have led to critical fabrication errors. These errors would have rippled through manufacturing. The moral of the story is that design quality is tied inextricably to finished product quality and, therefore, to a company's ultimate success. About the author Gavin Finn, Ph.D., is president and CEO of Prescient Technologies Inc. and is a leading industry spokesperson on the issue of design quality and its effect on the engineering process.