An integrated product development-quality management system for manufacturing

In this paper, an attempt has been made to develop an integrated product development-quality management (IPD-QM) system by integrating the concepts of concurrent engineering (CE) and TQM. These two concepts have been considered in the pastas a separate identity. However, there is a need to develop a system that would consider quality management and improvement at the design stage by incorporating the principles of total quality management (TQM) at every stage of the design and other upstream and downstream value-adding activities. TQM has been considered with reference to firm orientation and identifies market advantages, that are product design efficiency, process efficiency and product reliability. The special feature of the system proposed here is that it advises designers, product developers and process planners on improvements that can be made to the design to improve product quality and manufacturing efficiency, and customer satisfaction. Also, a framework has been discussed in this paper for the integration of CE and TQM in manufacturing.