Virtual Reality for Reverse Quality Management

Currently, quality management is carried out in a sequential feed forward manner. Inspections are carried out from process to process. As the requirements are getting diversified, the number of inspections increases rapidly. This approach is verification-based. But if we look at quality management from validation point of view, another quality management and inspection approach comes up. It is to look at quality management in the reverse direction from customers’ point of view. If we consider quality as satisfaction of our customers, then we can reduce the number of inspections and focus our efforts to carry out inspections to really satisfy our customers, not to satisfy design requirements. To achieve this goal, we have to characterize our customer’s quality requirements as patterns and use customer’s profiles of quality to manage quality in production. This is a feed back approach and we need feedback information about how our customers use our machines. Although this approach has great benefits of really satisfying our customers and of substantially reducing number of inspections, its disadvantage is that it cannot be applied to new products. But if we utilize VR technology, we can estimate how our customers will use such new products in their own environments and can obtain our customer’s profiles of quality requirements before they are really put to use. Such virtual feedback will enable application of reverse quality management to new products and would satisfy our customers greatly and would reduce the number of inspections greatly. Last but most important is that such feedback information will provide us with information how we should change our design models to really meet our customer’s expectations.