Cost Efficient Quality Strategies for Microsystems and Electronics Production

In the last years the authors developed new and powerful quality cost models to optimize quality strategies in electronics production. These models are successful in use and were published in some books (see (Oppermann, 2002), (Sauer, 2003) and (Linss, 2003)), tutorials, articles (see (Oppermann, 2003)) and presentations at important conferences like IWK99, IWK2005, ECTC2001, ISSE2002 and SMT HYBRID PACKAGING 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2006. These models look for the quality processes only to find out the optimized quality strategy by the minimum of costs. The next step was the development of an extension of these models to include the production process and its quality dependent properties into the cost models. The question is: how influences the improvement of a production process by investment the quality and the costs of the products? How much time does it need to reach a better quality level by lower costs? The new extension of the quality cost models gives help to the production engineers to make a decision about the right quality strategy. The basic quality cost model and the influence of investment is explained in this paper