Preventive Quality Management Methods in the Process Landscape

Preventive quality management methods (QM methods) are essential parts of the organization’s respective quality management system. They contribute essentially to the successful corporate management in order to comply with customer requests, to implement robust processes and to launch reliable products onto the market. For the compliance with national and international requirements from standards and laws, QM methods contribute essentially in the entire product lifecycle (e.g. FMEA in homologation testing). In the organization the recommendations and requirements for the use of preventive QM methods often lead to the question of the efficiency of such methods. In the case of the methods that have been used in daily practice for a long time, such as FMEA or SPC, their use is assessed empirically as effective due to the detected failures and/or nonconformities in the process. However, there are not any measuring variables for the objective assessment of the benefits for these as well as for the numerous preventive QM methods recommended by the VDA.