Improvements in the Production Environment Made Using Quality Management Tools

Abstract

Improvements are the outcomes of management activities aimed at ensuring that the performance of tasks is increasingly enhanced, often beyond expectations. Improvements can be defined as radical modifications that help achieve expected results. They can also be viewed as efforts to help create an environment in which activities, including manufacturing tasks, are executed with efficiency and consistency. Success in achieving the desired efficiency depends on employing appropriate tools that support efforts to boost the ability to achieve desired outcomes. Under the seventh principle of quality management, effective quality management can be assumed to require solid data and facts rather than speculation and ungrounded opinions. This principle also applies to improvements made to the manufacturing environment, which are only successful if based on robust data and information on the working environment, with all of its hazards and strains, as well as any other irregularities that compromise the ability to perform work safely and effectively. Thus, the manufacturing environment can only be improved once one has assessed the nature of specified hazards as well as the extent and nature of their impacts.

The article outlines some of the key (traditional and new) quality management tools available for collecting and processing data and information on the manufacturing environment. While the article’s primary focus is on a literature review, it presents sample applications of quality-assurance tools based on real-life cases taken from industry. These come predominantly from small and medium-sized enterprises engaged in various types of production.