Total Quality Management

Total Quality Management covers all your QA requirements to meet you entire manufacturing processes:

• Quality Management and Assurance
• Track and Monitor Quality Results
• Analyze Product Defects Using Charts and Reports
• Identify Nonconformances and Implement Corrective Actions
• Audit Your Quality Management System
• Quality Business Flow Diagram
• Quality Process Flow Diagram

Oracle Quality
Oracle Quality is an integrated quality management application designed to support manufacturers in the pursuit of total quality management (TQM), zero defects, continuous process improvement (CPI), and ISO 9000 certification. It is designed to support the diverse data collection needs of discrete, repetitive, assemble-to-order, and batch process manufacturers. Oracle Quality helps you manage and distribute critical quality information throughout your organization.

Oracle Quality can help do all of the following:

• establish quality standards for products and processes throughout the enterprise
• monitor performance relative to established quality standards
• identify and track process factors that are affecting product quality
• collect information about product defects, their causes, and their related dispositions
• ensure that test and inspection instructions are available at the appropriate steps throughout the supply chain for a given product
• ensure that the proper tests are performed at the right time and document all test results
• alert the appropriate personnel when products do not conform to standards
• provide flexible reporting on all aspects of quality management
• maintain a shared enterprise-wide repository of quality results

Actions and Alerts
You can designate that specific actions be taken based on the quality results that you collect. You can have Oracle Quality issue alerts and electronic notifications, as well as place jobs, repetitive schedules, items, suppliers, and purchase order lines on hold. For example, you can send an electronic mail notification to a given user or group of users, or put a job on hold when a critical measurement is outside the upper and lower
specification limits. You also can associate workflows that you create in Oracle Workflow with Quality actions, and specify that they are automatically initiated based on quality results.
You can define action rules and related actions for any collection element, and copy them to any collection plan containing the collection element. You also can define action rules for collection elements within collection plans, which makes the action rule(s) applicable only when the collection element is used within that plan.

Collection Plans
Collection plans are similar to test or inspection plans. They contain the collection elements that represent the specific data that you want to collect and report on. Collection plans can include collection elements that collect data on defect types, symptoms, causes, actions, critical measurements, or environmental characteristics, as
well as reference information such as item, lot number, serial number, operation, department, subinventory, supplier and customer. You also can specify target values and limits for collection plan elements, and mandate that certain actions be taken, based on the quality results entered. For example, you can specify that an electronic mail notification be sent when a temperature reaches a certain level.

Specifications
In Oracle Quality, you can define specifications for key characteristics of the products that you produce or the material that you receive from suppliers.  Specification describe the requirements of a product.
You can create specifications for items or categories of items by assigning them a group of collection elements and their specification limits. You can also create supplier specifications for items that you receive from specific suppliers. Further, you can create customer specifications specific to the product standards expected by customers. These three types of specifications help ensure that the goods you produce conform to your quality engineering standards and to your customers' quality standards.

Collection Elements
To collect quality data using Oracle Quality, you can set up a data collection structure referred to as a "collection plan." Collection plans consist of "collection elements," which are the basic building blocks of collection plans, and determine the data the plan will collect and report. You can define an unlimited number of collection elements for attributes such as defect, disposition, severity, cause, pass/fail results, or for variables such as voltage, resistance, temperature, or acidity.
For each collection element that you create, you can specify a list of acceptable values or specification limits such as target value and upper and lower limits.

Data Collection Options
You can enter results into the quality data repository:
directly as you perform transactions
by importing quality results from external sources using Collection Import.

You can enter quality results directly at any time. For example, a quality engineer can enter lot sampling results for a collection plan independent of the operator who enters the job completion transaction. The quality engineer can also query and update the quality results that the operator initiated.
If you collect quality data during transactions, you can optionally define quality collection triggers to determine which collection plan to use for a given transaction. For example, you can indicate that you want to use a collection plan called First Pass Yield when entering move transactions for a particular assembly item. Thus, you can control when and where in the transaction process to collect quality data. By making quality
data collection a part of the standard workflow, you can distribute quality assurance responsibilities throughout your organization.

You can use Collection Import to import quality data from external systems into the quality data repository. For example, you can import data from sources such as test equipment and gauges. Imported data is validated according to validation rules of the collection plan. Invalid entries are marked so that you can correct and resubmit them.

This maintains the integrity of the quality data repository by rejecting invalid item numbers, supplier numbers, and defect codes. The actions that you defined in the collection plan, such as electronic mail notifications, are triggered based on the incoming data.

Query, Report, and Export Data
Oracle Quality provides you with powerful inquiries that enable you to quickly find quality results. You can define your own selection criteria. For example, you can view failure results that are specific to item A54888 and that occurred at operation 10 during May of last year.

You can view quality results using on-line, ad hoc queries and through printed reports. You can also chart your results using trend charts, Pareto charts, control charts, and histograms.
You can save the settings you use to create charts, descriptive statistic views, and custom reports. For example, you can create a Pareto chart that graphically illustrates the top failures for all assemblies on a specific production line. You can then save the settings for this chart. Later, after collecting additional data about failures occurring on this production line, you can re-chart your results.
Furthermore, you can copy the settings that you save for a (source) chart, descriptive statistic view, or custom report to a destination chart, descriptive statistic view, or custom report. Copying setting in this manner allows you to view the same subset of data in different ways.

You can export information for further analysis. You can also access data directly from the quality data repository with products such as Oracle Discoverer. Direct database access is facilitated by database views.

Track and Monitor Quality Results
You can use Oracle Quality to track and monitor quality results. You can, for example
use Oracle Quality to do all of the following:

• Track First Article Inspection Defects
• Track Serial Controlled Items
• Track Lot Controlled Items
• Analyze Product Defects Using Charts and Reports

Track First Article Inspection Defects
You can use Oracle Quality to track quality results from first article inspections. If you are only interested in knowing that a part is defective and the date that it was determined to be defective, you can create your collection plan accordingly. If you choose, you can create an alert action that sends the buyer of a part an electronic mail notification each time one of their parts is found to be defective.

Track Serial Controlled Items
You can monitor serial controlled assemblies, subassemblies, and components by creating and using collection plans to do the following:

• record quality characteristics about serialized units received from suppliers
• record movement, inspection, test results and disposition of serialized items throughout the production process
• maintain a history of inspection and test results for a particular serialized unit including the most current recorded activity or location in work in process
• record serial number genealogy by recording the relationship between two serialized units; for example, record an assembly serial number and a
• component serial number
• record the shipment of a serial controlled assembly and the customer site it was shipped to
• record DOA (dead-on-arrival) details for a serialized unit when it is reported as failed at a customer site
• record RMA (return material authorization) details upon notification of a defective, serialized unit; these details can be queried for receiving approval on
• the dock of your service organization or depot repair center

For example, you can create a collection plan that is used to collect component item, serial number, test date, test type, and test result data.

Use serial genealogy to track the transaction and multilevel composition history of any serial-controlled item from receipt through work in process and inventory to your customer sale. Using the Genealogy window, Quality Collections tab, you can view any quality collection plans associated with the item.

Track Lot Controlled Items
You can monitor lot controlled assemblies, subassemblies, component, batches, and processes by creating and using collection plans to:

• record quality characteristics about lots received from suppliers
• track lots through production and record where a lot has been
• track lot genealogy by recording the relationship between two lots; for example, record a lot and the base lot it originated from
• record end lot quality characteristics during or after production
• record a lot and the customer it was shipped to

Use lot genealogy to view the relationship between lots and provide lot traceability that results from inventory transactions. Using the Genealogy window, Quality Collections tab, you can view any quality collection plans associated with the item

Analyze Product Defects Using Charts and Reports
You can create a variety of charts using Oracle Quality. You can also create custom reports.

Pareto Charts
You can summarize and chart product defects using Pareto's law to focus on the most often occurring defects. For example, you can create a Product Defects collection plan containing collection elements like defect code and quantity defective, as well as reference information collection elements like item, department, and supplier. You can use this collection plan to collect detailed results for each failed inspection. Once results are collected, you can create a Pareto chart showing the quantity of failed inspections by defect code, department, item category, and so on.

Histograms
You can use histogram to provide a graphic summary of variation in a set of data. Histograms are useful in the study of process capability because they graphically display the shape, location, and scatter of quality results data.

Trend Charts
You can use trend charts to analyze data collected over a period of time. For example, you can create a Glazing Process collection plan to collect process quality variables such as oven temperature and voltage from a glazing process. You can use this collection plan to record five readings at random times during each shift. Once the results are collected, you can create a trend chart to graphically display the results of temperature
or voltage.

Control Charts
You can use control charts to determine whether process stability has been upset by special or assignable causes. You can create the following types of control charts in Oracle Quality:

• Xbar and R charts (XBar R)
• Individual X and Moving Range charts (XmR)
• Xbar and S charts (XBar S)

Custom Reports
Using the Quality Results ReportWriter, you can create a variety of custom reports to list and summarize results. For example, if you have created and collected results using a collection plan that contains collection elements like item, job, job quantity, quantity completed, quantity scrapped, and inspection results, you can create a report that summarizes your inspection results as well as a report that uses these same results to
show yield (quantity complete versus job quantity) by job, by item, or by item category.

Identify Nonconformances and Implement Corrective Actions
Oracle Quality provides a set of collection plan templates that enable suppliers or internal personnel to log quality nonconformances prior to receipt of purchased goods, during receipt, or during the manufacturing process. A nonconformance plan can initiate a disposition, which assigns the nonconformance to specific individuals for action and final resolution. You can use a corrective action request (CAR) to identify problems in the quality system, such as a nonconformance, an audit observation, or a finding. The CAR lifecycle includes problem identification, corrective actions, and actions that prevent recurrence of the problem.

Audit Your Quality Management System
You can conduct audits of a potential supplier, an active supplier, or your own quality management system using seeded collection plan templates. Use the audit collection plans to generate corrective action requests, too, if desired. Audits can help ensure that you and your suppliers meet quality standards, such as ISO 9000

Quality Business Flow Diagram
The following diagram illustrates the flow of quality information within a business using Oracle Quality:

 

Quality Process Flow Diagram
The entire process of defining data collection components, collecting, reporting, and analyzing data is summarized by the following diagram: