Pillar- 5 Quality Maintenance 

The quality of a finished product has direct correlation with the material quality, equipment precision, production method, and process parameters. The basic concept of process quality Management to set and maintain condition to achieve zero defect in the finished product.
Quality Maintenance

The customary perspective on support was to adjust the upkeep cost with an acceptable level of availability and reliability  often unfinished but he level of buffer stocks, which hid the immediate impact of equipment problem. In traditional complained, maintenance is seen as an expense that can easily be reduce in relation to the overall business, particularly in the short term, Conversely, maintenance manager have always argues that to increase the level of availability and reliability of the equipment, more expenditure needs to be committed to the maintenance budget. With the onset of substantial availability problem caused but the new way of running the plant, management soon released but just giving more resource to the maintenance department was not going to produce a cost effective solution.

The conflict between maintenance cost and availability is similar to the old quality mind set before the advent of Total Quality Control(TQC), that higher required more resource, and hence cost for final inspection and rework. TQC emphasized prevention at source of the problem rather than by inspection at the end of the process. Rather than expanding the investigation office, all workers were prepared and motivated to be responsible for identifying problem at the earliest possible point in the process so as to minimize rectification costs. This view did not mean disbanding the quality control office but rather having it now concentrate on more specialist quality activity such as variation reduction through process improvement. This new approach to quality demonstrate that getting quality right first time dose not cost money but actually reduce the total cost of operating the business.

This new quality methodology of ‘Prevention at source’  was converted into upkeep maintenance environment through the concept of TPM resulting in superior availability, reliability and maintainability of equipment but also with significant improvement in capacity with a substantial reduction in both maintenance cost and total operation costs. TPM is based on ‘Prevention at source’  and is focused on identifying and eliminating the source of equipment deterioration rather than the more traditional approach of either letting equipment fail before requiring it, or applying it, or applying preventive/Predictive strategy to identify and repair equipment after the deterioration has taken hold and caused the need for expensive repairs.

Policy of Quality maintenance

  • Maintenance perfect equipment to maintain perfect quality of problem.
  • Focus on prevention of defect at sources.
  • In process checking of equipment condition to keep all the values within the standard permitted values to prevent defects.
  • Predict possibility of defects by analysis of observed data.
  • Transition of quality policy firm reactive to proactive (Quality control to quality assurance)
  • Apply this quality policy through operator equipment maintenance.


Objective of quality maintenance

  • TO achieve customer delight through zero defect concept
  • To reduce the in process defect to minimum level
  • To reduce cost of quality
  • In order to achieve these objective we have to get the following data from the close observation of equipment, process, product and customer complained.
  • Product wise defects
  • Analysis of defect into various categories
  • Location wise distribution of defect
  • Equipment wise defect distribution
  • Severity of defect and frequency of defect at each location
  • Trends and pattern of defect during the processing of production.
  • Trend of occurrence of defect after modification/repair/replacement if parts at equipment.

Operating condition at equipment related to men, machine, and material
The comparison of standards setting/condition at equipment ad actual observation.