Quality management should focus on prevention, with containment as a supplementary measure

Thread Content

Truly implementing the principle of \"prevention first\" is the essence of quality management. Those working in quality management often feel a lot of pressure, as customer complaints are inevitable whenever quality issues arise, and some of these issues can even lead to safety accidents; therefore, protecting customers is of top priority. At the same time, the occurrence of quality problems leads to an increase in an organization’s quality costs. The emergency measures taken also incur costs, including the scrapping of defective parts and customer claims. In more severe cases, legal liability may arise due to joint responsibility, and all these fall under the category of quality costs. This also highlights the importance of quality; knowing how to ensure high quality becomes a top priority for an organization. Regarding quality, customers are likely to say that it doesn’t matter how you manage things, as long as the products delivered to them meet the required standards. Once customers discover problems, penalties will be imposed – this is a typical result-oriented requirement. To meet this requirement, the most fundamental thing is to conduct thorough quality checks on products at the time of production, before they are sent to customers, so as to identify and retain all defective products within the organization. This approach is also costly, but of course it is much more economical than identifying the problem at the customer’s location and then trying to address it there. Just as Yu the Great managed the floods in ancient times, before him many people tried to contain the waters, but failed in doing so; it was only Yu the Great who used a method of guiding the waters that enabled him to bring the floods under control. The same is true for quality issues; if control is not implemented at the source, merely trying to contain the problems will only solve them temporarily and is not a sustainable solution. Prevention is necessary for quality issues. There is a saying that quality is designed in; indeed, when designing, one must consider the effectiveness and reliability of the design, with particular attention to the feasibility of the manufacturing process. Because the final design is realized through manufacturing processes. The quality of most products is determined at the stage of product design. This is the very first source where quality is ensured. Of course, the most direct aspect is process design – how to transform the design into a physical product, what processes should be used to create it, what equipment is necessary for manufacturing, how tooling should be designed, what the specific process parameters are, what requirements apply to raw materials and components, and how personnel should operate and conduct inspections – all of these are things that need to be considered and verified. The process ensures quality from aspects such as people, machinery, materials, methods, environment, and testing; it is also necessary to consider what type of error-prevention measures should be employed. If both the product design and the manufacturing processes have been verified as correct, then ensuring quality becomes the responsibility of the relevant operators. Thus, the concept of total quality comes into play: everyone is responsible for quality, and everyone must operate in accordance with the requirements, refusing to accept, produce, or pass on defective products. What the organization needs to do is establish mechanisms to ensure that everyone can carry out their tasks as required. While carrying out tasks as required, everyone needs to consider whether there are better ways to improve quality; only in this way can continuous improvement be achieved and costs reduced. Therefore, quality management should focus on prevention, with containment serving as a supplementary measure. Prevention must start with product design and process design, extending to the management of every process; all relevant personnel must be able to carry out their tasks as required to ensure quality. In the event of a problem, containment is the approach to take; of course, while containing it, it is necessary to identify the root cause as quickly as possible and prevent it from occurring again.