We have been honoured with export awards for 18 years, during the last 35 years of our working by The Plastics Export Promotion Council, Mumbai working under the auspices of Ministry of Commerce, Government of India. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) at Asian, which is a process of listening to what is "designed" during the initial planning of the product itself - before it is put on paper or on assembly line.
QFD process at Asian involves taking up of a broad specification or specific problems or needs of the customer using a logical way to fulfill the customer's demands with the available resources. Any QFD exercise aims at answering the three basic questions:
What are the qualities that the customer desires in the product?
What functions must this product serve?
Based upon the resources we have, how best can we provide what the customer needs?
QFD is a paradigm change from traditional "Manufacturing Quality" to "Product Design Quality" at Asian - Traditional Manufacturing Quality is achieved by inspecting the product for specific procedure, also, commonly called as "Inspected-In-Quality". However QFD practice at Asian emphasises on incorporating moulds. This is called "Designed-In-Quality". Designed-In-Quality is the foundation stone for simultaneous concurrent engineering. There are four phases to any QFD exercise. The four phases are:
1. Design
2. Details
3. Process
4. Production
These phases help communicate product requirements from the customer to design teams to the production operators. Each phase has a matrix consisting of a vertical column of "Whats" and a horizontal rows of "Hows". "Whats" are customers requirements and "Hows" are the ways of achieving them.
By involving all the departments in ensuring quality during design, QFS helps in the breakdown of functional barriers and replaces emotion with logic which are important aspects in today's fast changing organisations. QFD helps bring together data from diverse resources and arrive at a methodology to meet customer expectations, competitive market analyses, engineering, expertise, manufacturing capabilities, strategic goals and cost considerations. By using collective knowledge we at Asian identify what will work, what will not and what to avoid.
This QFD in conjunction with TPM (Total Productive Maintenance) consisting of sourcing of raw materials to manufacturing to in-house product movement to Assembling floor - help us to maintain our competitive advantage by manufacturing products that meet customers quality needs at a price that delights the customer.
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