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.

In our quest for Quality, Texas Instruments Defense Group and Munro & Associates, Inc. developed the predictive tool Quality Report Card® (QRC®) tool jointly in 1994 to assist TI in making products that must have the highest attainable Quality (six sigma). TI, with very low production numbers, (smart bombs and missiles) knew that the product had to be designed for six-sigma in order to achieve this high Quality.  Dr. Ed Deming, the Quality Master who helped the Japanese achieve world class Quality, stated, “Quality improves as variation decreases” and Sandy Munro had often said “all variation comes from the design”. TI chose Munro to assist them because of this reputation.

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