Control Plans

Poor control and understanding of variation is the fundamental cause of quality issues in both product designs and manufacturing processes. Indeed, the cost of poor quality can be rephrased as the cost of poor understanding of variations.

As a result, it’s fair to consider the control plan is the end goal of the quality planning process. It reflects the sum of all your design and process engineering and quality planning efforts and your understanding of your product, processes, supplier capabilities and customer requirements.

The problem is that due to the overwhelming effort and cost of keeping control plans in sync with other quality planning documents, control plans aren't updated as often as they should be, or changes to control plans aren't reflected back in the source quality planning documents that generated the control plan in the first place. As a result, any best practice or lesson learned is lost beyond the immediate manufacturing cycle for that product. Where updates are made, the cost in engineering time is enormous.

To have effective control plans, companies need to:

• Identify critical and special characteristics
• Have an effective Gage plan
• Validate characteristics and controls through design verification
• Apply best practices and lessons learned to those characteristics
• Continuously improve the characteristics and controls based on ongoing engineering, issues, root cause analysis, corrective actions, and shared lessons and best practices learned from other facilities, customers, and suppliers
• Have changes to any document in the quality lifecycle automatically reflected in upstream and downstream quality documents

In effect, control plans are the result of all quality planning activities at all stages of the quality lifecycle. Dyadem’s lifecycle approach makes control plans a reflection of your entire quality value chain and history and provides the essential platform for continuous improvement in your ability to control variation and satisfy your customers. The labour savings alone in creating and updating control plans can justifiy the implementation of a QLM system.