Study On The Quality Management Of Plating Workshop For KH Company

KH Company is the second K & B products facility that KH Company (US) builds in China, and it is the biggest K & B manufacturing base that KH Company (US) owns world-wide. Its quality management has been elevated from simple quality control at the very start when KH Company was founded in 2004 to today's ISO 9001 Quality Assurance System. With the economic globalization and the overall increase of raw materials across the world, the industrial competitions are becoming more and more fierce. In addition, as the end customers'aesthetic awareness as well as quality awareness become stronger and the environment protection laws are tightening the reins on all industries, K & B industry is facing the biggest challenges that it has ever seen. Under such challenging situations, KH Company, as a company, has not made a dedicated study on the quality management of component finish treatment, which is a very critical process of the K & B product manufacturing.I have been working with the plating lines of KH Company since 2004 on the production, engineering, and quality management. This thesis is written based on my experience over the years in plating industry, and it is filled with study cases and actual data analysis. Focusing on the quality management structure of the plating lines of KH Company as well as on the key elements of the quality assurance systems, this thesis, from perspectives of quality planning, quality control, quality assurance, and quality management improvement, reveals the quality-related issues that exist in the plating lines including low RTY (Rolled Throughput Yield) for new product development, reoccurrences of emergent and major quality problems, variable manufacturing processes, unreliable quality of incoming materials from upstream processes, improper structures of plating racks, immature quality improvement mechanisms, and fluctuating quality performance. Furthermore, this thesis identifies the root causes of those quality-related issues including poor quality awareness ofoperators, insufficient popularization of TQC and TPM concepts,7S and KAIZEN projects unable to reach the front-line employees, weak workforce, poor control of quality of incoming materials from the upstream processes, performance evaluation systems and layered process audit system not being in full use. Against the quality-related issues and the root causes, this thesis defines several corrective actions including developing a consistent performance evaluation system combined with Suggestion Encouragement System, implementing wall-to-wall layered process audits, utilizing learning curves to recruit talents, controlling process parameters effectively via SPC charts, installing data-oriented management, and incorporating the process parameters, plating rack design, operation skills, material movements, equipment logs into quality control and analysis for better quality management...