Application of proactive quality methods to increase business value

The application of Proactive Tools and Methodologies and Early Warning Systems are used to assist in identifying problems early in the development cycle and in turn improving the quality of a design and avoiding the post launch quality improvement iterations. A key topic of focus will be latent failures, which typically are the costliest and most complex failure modes in the lifecycle of a product. If it can be anticipated how a product will perform in the field, the design can be altered to avoid costly (in both monetary and customer satisfaction terms) field issues. This can be accomplished through the utilization of several techniques and tools throughout the product development cycle. An in-depth analysis of the use of these tools will be provided, including the ongoing deployment of these tools in IBM´s Server products. The application of these tools and methodologies with modeling, simulation and sensitivity analyses can effectively enable product development to test inputs and resulting outputs while minimizing the need to build costly physical test systems to prove early designs. This will also help in improving overall product quality and customer satisfaction. The core of a successful quality management system is an established set of quantifiable quality goals, which are determined based on input from customers based on market perceptions and demands. The goals are further dissected into individual metrics spanning all aspects of the product from concept through life cycle. The metrics must be kept synchronized with the quality perceptions and market demands to ensure customer satisfaction. Thus, to ensure the quality management system meets the customer´s requirements there has to be a constant feedback loop to identify problems found and drive to root cause corrective action. Logically, as new problems are found, the quality management process must react to be able to identify the new problems earlier in the lifecycle of the product. Timely data colle- - ction and analysis along with process control and other quality techniques are key foundations to be able to ensure that the quality management system can quickly adapt to the various types of problems experienced as well as provide a firm baseline on which to improve quality performance measurements. While the need will always exist to react and adapt to the various problems in the day to day process, we need to continue to drive problem identification and discovery upstream, and thus drive for a proactive quality management system. A quality management system and proactive quality have helped IBM significantly improve field performance and customer satisfaction