Designing Quality

High quality products and services must start from proper planning. Quality should be designed into products and services, taking into consideration customer requests and requirements. The design stage involves many steps all focused on confirming, verifying all new methods, technologies, materials and functions that has been proposed and developed. They must be tried and tested before the new design can go through the production stage. Wastes are produced from defective designs that are passed on to production, and vendors. It is acknowledged here that it is not an easy process, there are difficulties and all must comply with legal and commercial requirements. Come to think of it, achieving high quality products through good design must be set as a challenge to all organizations to survive especially in this difficult times.

Design Quality into Goods and Services

Quality in design means ensuring you have captured and incorporate all your customer needs from your products and services. Customer can be internal, external, user, maintenance people, public authorities, enforcing agencies/bodies, etc. Quality must be built during design stage. Design must ensure products are 'easy' to be produced, 'easy' to be checked and inspected, easy nice, fun, good for the user to use, and does not pose major problems (safety, usability, performance, etc) to all people who will come into contact throughout the life of the product/goods/services. Maintenance and after sales personnel must be able to disassemble and reassemble the components/systems of the products easily and time desired. Spare parts to replace broken or damaged components must also be made available so that repair time is shortened and customer is happy.

I don't buy a car to be put at the service centres for repair or waiting for spare parts to reach before repair work can be done.
Design for manufacturability is an aspect needed to be learned and applied by engineers. Construction industry has not advanced much in term of design for constructability since a number of infrastructure projects have faced with structural and quality defects even after it has been used for quite some time. The MRR highway in KL is a case in point that I can remember.

My suggestion is Think about How to Build Quality INTO all our Artifacts/Products/ and Services. It is difficult, I know, but, tell me what is easy in life?