In this chapter our major focus is on lean manufacturing of various products while applying techniques and methodologies to achieve zero defect in products, and significantly eliminate waste and discharges to environment from the manufacturing process.
The quality of products, processes, and services has become a major decision factors in most industries and businesses today. Regardless of whether the consumer is an individual, a corporation, a military defense program, or a retail store, when the consumer is making purchase decisions, he or she is likely to consider quality to be equal in importance to cost and schedule. Consequently, quality improvement has become a major concern to many US industries and businesses. Quality control and quality assurance is a critical process of producing high‐quality products that should be a top priority of any manufacturing firm in today’s competitive environment. This also means designing and building products that conform to specifications and satisfy or exceed customer expectation. The American Society for Quality Control (ASQC) defines quality as “the totality of features and characteristics of a product or process or service that bear on its ability to satisfy given needs (Evans and Lindsay 1992). Quality control (QC) is a process by which entities review the quality of all factors involved in production. ISO 9000 defines quality control as “A part of quality management focused on fulfilling quality requirements” (ISO 2018a).
Quality means fitness for use with zero defects or zero effects in environmentally conscious manufacturing. For example, you or I may purchase automobiles that we expect to be free of manufacturing defects and that should provide reliable and economical transportation, a retailer buys finished goods with the expectation that they are properly packaged and arranged for easy storage and display, and a manufacturer buys raw material and expects to process it with no rework or scrap. In other words, all consumers expect that the products and services they buy will meet their requirements. Those requirements define fitness for use.
Quality or fitness for use is determined through the interaction of quality of design and quality of conformance with quality control. By quality of design for environment and other aspects, we mean the different grades or levels of performance, reliability, serviceability, and function that are the result of deliberate engineering and environmental management decisions. By quality of conformance, we mean systematic reduction of variability and elimination of defects until every, unit, batch, and product produced is identical in physical and chemical properties (zero defect and zero effect).
Some confusion exists in our society and manufacturing industry about quality improvement; some people still think that it means gold‐plating a product or spending more money to develop a process or/and product. This thinking is wrong. Quality improvement means the systematic elimination of waste. Examples of waste include scrap and rework in manufacturing, inspection and test, errors on documents (such as engineering drawings, checks, purchase orders, and plans), customer complaint hot lines, warranty costs, and the time required to do things over again that could have been done right the first time. A successful quality‐improvement effort can eliminate much of this waste and lead to lower costs, higher productivity, increased customer satisfaction, increased business reputation, higher market share, and ultimately higher profits for the company. One vice president of DuPont has said that whenever the company eliminates a pound of waste, the material most likely ends up in a product. At DuPont, titanium dioxide wastes are converted to high‐purity table salt, fertilizer, and food‐grade carbon dioxide.
The lean manufacturing is a system whose techniques aim to significantly eliminate waste in the manufacturing process. The Toyota way or system is about Toyota culture in auto industry which focuses on the management principle of Toyota in a 4P model: Philosophy, Process, People, and Problem Solving – the foundation of which is a long‐term philosophy that emphasizes on adding value to customers and society. Building on that is Toyota’s investment in lean processes, which concentrates on shortening lead time by eliminating waste. Eliminating waste is done by people and partners using rigorous problem‐solving methods, the two top layers of the 4P model. More on the Toyota management system and lean manufacturing, or simply lean, is described in Section 8.2.
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