A Total Quality Management Information System for Auto Parts Manufacturers in the United States

In order to compete in the world markets, American businesses are striving to improve their competitive edges, and one of these competitive edges is quality. Now quality is not only a order winning criteria but also is an order qualifier for many companies. Total quality management (TQM) has been widely accepted as ways and means for achieving excellence in quality in this new millennium by many companies around the world. Multitudes of businesses in manufacturing industry have already implemented or started implementing TQM for achieving quality excellence and improving competitive edge in the world market place This paper presents the results of a survey determining the information needs for implementing total quality management by auto parts manufacturers in the United States and the presents a framework of design and development of a Total Quality Management Information System(TQMIS) for an auto parts manufacturers. Introduction As advocated by AX Fiegenbaum in the U.S. and Katiro Ishikawa in Japan, Total Quality Management (TQM) involves management and control of quality through out the entire organization (7). In TQM marketing department collects the customer expectation data using market survey (customer / dealers) survey and provides them to product development and design department. Product development and design department in turn designs a selected variety of products to best match the needs and expectations of the target customers as provided by the marketing department. and pass the drawings to manufacturing department for fabrication and assembly. Then, manufacturing department makes parts and assembles the products according to design specifications. Quality control department regularly monitors and inspect production and assembly processes to make sure that parts and assemblies are produced according to product design specifications. Packaging and distribution's responsibility is to package and deliver the product to the customers undamaged and at just in time (8). TQM emphasizes on customer focus. Product quality is commonly defined as the product's fitness for its intended use which means how well the product meets the needs and expectation of its customers. Again different customers have different needs and expectations. Therefore a product must be designed to meet the needs and expectations of its target customers (1). Marketing regularly collects and analyzes customers needs and expectation data from customer and dealer surveys and pass them down to product design department. When product design the product by incorporating as many quality characteristics as possible not just to meet but to exceed customers expectations. This is known as design qualiT TaSuchi, a Japanese Quality advocate, pointed out that products generally fail due to bad design even if manufacturing and quality control is very effective(20). In his book Taguchi's Method s for Product Design, Taguchi introduced the concept of House of Quality for incorporating customers expectation information into technicalspecifications in product design. He also suggested the use of statistical methods of Design of Experiment for prioritizing the customers expectation data before incorporating them into technical specifications of product design. He also suggested the principles of Robust Design in which a product must be designed to withstand any changes in its operating environment (2). After the product is designed, limited number of products are produced and used for test marketing to receive customer feed backs which are used for refining the design of the product to exceeds ever increasing customers expectations. Moreover, manufacturing must make die product conforming to design specifications and tolerances which is commonly is known as quality of conformance (1). In current business environment, quality of a product has been regarded very often, as an order qualifier, an essential characteristics for doing business in world marketplace(3) Quality starts in the marketplace Quality is important for two reasons. …