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1992
Conference Paper
Titel
CAQ systems - a functional survey. Effective quality management requires some tools
Alternative
CAQ Systeme - ein Ăśberblick
Abstract
Quality has become one of the major instruments alongside price for establishing a product on the market or maintaining competitiveness. This realization has been generally admitted in the last few years and has led to a review of the quality philosophy in many companies and of the methods and means used previously for quality assurance. New ways had to be sought to satisfy customer demands with respect to product quality, reliability and its documentation. As the general demand for information on quality status both within the company and with customers and hence the amount of data to be registered and processed have increased at the same time, it appeared expedient to go about tackling these problems with the help of computers. The realization that quality data must be seen in a global and interdisciplinary context and that quality assurance affects almost all planning and executive sectors of a company led to the development of computer-assisted quality assurance and information - o r CAQ-systems. The objective of this paper is to outline today's state of the art of computer aided quality control and (management) information systems. At the beginning the past development, major requirements and global functioning of today's CAQ-systems will be described. Then standard and advanced features are examined. An examination of the individual phases in the life of a product will show that quality data is produced at every stage, from planning and conception to production and that CAQ systems today cover the wide field of production, from incoming goods and processing to assembly, final inspection and dispatch, but take little account of the supplier-related or production-related product phases. Recently, however, aids have been developed in these areas in the form of knowledge-based systems (e.g. expert systems) in design, construction, test planning, computer-aided failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), diagnosis systems, etc., which will be mentioned. Next will be t