Quality Report Card® Analysis

Munro & Associates has developed a proven methodology for measuring, quantifying and predicting the Cost of Quality.  This method applies to the costs or expenses associated with Quality in several factors:

1. Costs of attaining a certain level of quality in your production, manufacturing, or deployment operations;
2. Costs of defects that occur in the field, or cost of "non-conformance;"
3. Life cycle costs as a result of poor quality or low reliability.

Through our analyses, Munro can identify root causes of poor quality and affect change to a design or process that minimizes risk or eliminates a critical link in a chain.

Quality improvement was one of our founding principles in 1988.  Key personnel now at Munro were on a core team that led the effort at Texas Instruments' Defense Systems and Electronics Group that culminated in winning the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 1992.  At the beginning of the quest for the MBNQA, TI recognized that the product had to be designed for Six Sigma in order to be honored as a World Class Quality producer.  Dr. W. Edwards Deming, the Quality Master who helped the Japanese achieve world class Quality, stated, "Quality improves as variation decreases."  As a Deming disciple, Sandy Munro has often said "all variation comes from the design."  TI chose Munro to assist them because of this focus and reputation for achieving results.  Based on the significance of Six Sigma in TI's quest, Munro went on to develop a predictive tool that we call the Quality Report Card® (QRC®).  The QRC® not only includes a foundation in the Six Sigma measurement system, but goes on to provide a calculation of Q Burden, which is the financial burden that each good unit bears to pay for poor quality and the systems and methods that are necessary to provide Quality conformance.  Q Burden includes key elements of Total Accounted Cost that are directly related to details of the design of the product.

QRC® is a valuable tool to predict Quality at the design stage. QRC® was developed based on the six-sigma philosophy and records the inherent defect rate designed into the product.  An itemized list of all parts in the assembly from Lean Design® is used in conjunction with known or pre-programmed PPM and warranty data to capture defects which will affect product Quality.  QRC® highlights poor quality drivers and predicts "right first time" capability and cost of poor Quality in the design stage or on the factory floor.  QRC® will quantify the cost of the hidden factory and will prioritize where the most savings can be found.

QRC® analysis is utilized to identify critical features, key parts and performance risks.  QRC® identifies and predicts where defects are occurring, estimates annual cost of defect containment, "rolled yield," and will help prioritize and track Quality and process improvements.  This analysis should be applied to every redesign concept.  When combined with the Lean Design® analysis, this yields a total accounted cost business case for your product design including expected return on investment.

QRC® helps expose the "hidden factory" of waste that robs organizations of profits due to routinely dealing with things that go wrong.  QRC® has been used in thousands of benchmarking exercises to find world-class conditions that can be adopted by an organization that wants to drive toward perfection.  QRC® provides a new tool for data-driven management methods that rely on the gathering of Quality data to develop new product designs, prioritize process improvement activity, and drive toward single digit parts per million (ppm) defect rates.

Munro & Associates' QRC® deployment strategy emphasizes that there is a direct correlation between customer satisfaction, warranty costs, waste, operating cost, and the number of product defects.  To this end, QRC® statistic measures the capability of a given process to perform virtually defect-free work.  The common measurement can be applied to a component, a machined part, an assembly, a product development process, life cycle management costs, or an administration task.

"If you have no numbers to support your theory you don't know what you're talking about." -- Sir Isaac Newton