Achieving Agility in Enterprise Quality Management Processes with Siemens Low Code

Achieving Agility in Enterprise Quality Management Processes with Siemens Low Code

Quality management (QM) is a critical business process for enterprises. Without it, enterprises cannot continuously produce high-quality products that meet customer expectations. With business transformation and customer requirements for increased product configurability, having an agile quality management process has become more important than ever. This article will explain enterprise quality management, the necessity of implementing an agile quality management process, and the value of low-code application development.

What is Quality Management and why is it important?

Quality management is a process that companies deploy to ensure that product quality meets customer expectations, design specifications and regulatory requirements. In the past, the quality management process referred to the establishment and inspection mechanism during the production stage, but now the starting point of the process has moved forward to the engineering design stage. In the demand management process, companies will confirm that the current product design and production process can meet the requirements of specific products and that the finished product has stable and consistent quality.

Quality management also includes operational risk and failure mode analysis during the design phase to achieve the stability required for product verification and related manufacturing processes. Enterprises must also be able to track defects found during or after the production process, and complement them with cost analysis, so that clear ROI and effective solutions can be obtained when analyzing problems, and finally make wise decisions based on problem reports.

Small batch production in all industries is gradually decreasing, and customers expect companies to listen and respond to user opinions. Therefore, quality management needs to be flexible and agile to control potential problems, develop inspection plans, and guide production, rather than rigidly sticking to factory-specific processes, quality inspection gates, or the work of quality inspectors.

Why is it difficult for enterprises to achieve agile quality management?

Few companies will customize a quality management system (QMS). They generally choose to purchase a ready-made QMS that covers about 80% of their needs, but these systems are usually not adapted to the company's unique processes. The market size of quality management systems is much smaller than that of manufacturing execution systems or product lifecycle management software. The key reason is that most companies purchase quality management systems on a one-time basis, which also means that it is difficult to have subsequent long-term maintenance services.

Although it can bring a good return on investment in a short period of time, the value of such a ready-made quality management system will depreciate rapidly. For example, if a company purchases a new factory and shifts its business model to a different product line during a restructuring, it may not be suitable to use the existing system. Another example is that the company deployed the then QMS several years before the release of several major new software. The new features released many years later were unable to use all the new features due to version restrictions, which ultimately resulted in the 20% annual maintenance fee of the QMS being basically "wasted".

When enterprises accumulate technical debt using an off-the-shelf QMS, they face a difficult choice: whether to completely transform the previous system or build a completely new QMS according to new specifications, but each choice comes with its own risks. Fortunately, there is finally a solution to this dilemma.

How does low-code make quality management agile?

Low-code has greatly lowered the threshold for application development, allowing people without professional development skills to participate in the construction of applications. Development methods such as Java require people to have knowledge of specific programming languages, but low-code does not require expertise in this field. There are three key aspects of low-code application development: building user interfaces in an intuitive and templated way, designing business logic in a graphical way, and mapping databases to application information flows.

Through low-code, companies can empower quality management managers to build applications that cover processes that were not covered before. For example, when a company needs to cover processes that the existing QMS cannot handle, such as integrating model-based system engineering design methods into risk assessment of production processes. However, companies often ignore these quality management processes that can be quickly improved in their digital transformation plans due to the cost, time and complexity involved in building applications. With the help of low-code, citizen developers with the right toolset can build a prototype of the required application in a few days. Direct participation in the creation of the application not only increases employee participation and willingness to use, but is also a key step in management process change.

Low-code helps enterprises achieve agile quality management

Frequent changes in business models or product requirements require more attention to quality management, a key process. Low-code application development provides enterprises and employees with suitable toolkits and technologies, reducing the high investment costs required to improve the agility of quality management processes, while shortening the time and approval procedures required to achieve this goal.