The cost of quality, or perhaps costs associated with poor quality, is a common discussion point within many UK board rooms today.  With unrivalled manufacturing growth in the Far East, mass produced items do not always represent the best quality but do very often tempt customers with very low prices.  How can we compete in the UK?  One approach is to offer a higher quality product, that is more durable, reliable and with a potentially longer service life. 

The management of quality within production environments is not easy, all too often regarded as a cost to the business, rather than a potential saving when the cost of product failure and returns is taken into consideration.  The experience at Ardent Solutions when implementing business systems into organisations is that quality systems typically grow out of necessity, perhaps driven by a specific historic failure in the process.  All too often this can result in quality systems that are isolated from core business systems, introducing duplication of effort maintaining data, and a lack of visibility to the business as a whole.

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 features a quality module, embedded into core business processes of the system.  Rule driven quality associations automatically create relationships between specific system transactions.  Throughout a complete supply chain, the quality module within Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 has the ability to automatically create quality orders, holding specific transactions and requiring specific quality operations to be completed.  Consider a supplier that consistently delivers sub standard materials that sometimes inadvertently get released into production.  This can be controlled at the point of receipt, automatically quarantining the raw materials until the quality process has been carried out.  Consider a specific operation on your shop floor that has the potential to introduce reliability issues to the finished product.  Again, this can be controlled within Microsoft Dynamics AX2009, automatically generating quality orders for specific production operations or processes.  Where quality orders identify a problem, this can be documented as a non conformance with corrective actions to address the quality issue.  All of these transactions can then be reported upon, providing the information to continually engineer higher quality into your products.  The question isn’t how much quality costs but how much quality improvements can increase profitability.  This functionality is available as standard within Microsoft Dynamics AX2009.

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