Review Quality Mining Day: Quality as the engine of change

Sven O. Rimmelspacher, Managing Director of the South German CAQ software manufacturer Quality Miners GmbH, opened the Quality Mining Day on October 20, 2022. In his speech, he referred to the ability to change again and again. He experienced firsthand that this does not always mean a steep uphill climb: "In 2003, customers put us through the wringer and told us as hard as nails: you have to do something about your quality!" For Rimmelspacher, that was a decisive turning point. "We reinvented ourselves, completely turned around our understanding of quality and integrated this as a driving force in our solutions and partnership with our customers."

Fall down and get up quickly

Extreme sportsman Norman Bücher, saw his own thesis confirmed in the history of the Quality Miners: "When children start running, they fall down again and again, but get right back up and keep going. Falling down is part of life - even in our professional lives - it's only through this that we learn to rise above ourselves." Dr. Ing. Benedikt Sommerhoff, Head of Innovation & Transformation at DGQ also thinks it's "great to revise yourself. Failure is an opportunity." During the panel discussion, he spoke enthusiastically of how "experimentation has become more hopeful in Germany."

The fact that this outgrowing of oneself can also take on many a stylistic blossom was vividly demonstrated by bestselling author Prof. Dr. Ing. Lars Vollmer in his lecture to the eagerly listening audience as a "business theater". "Start-ups act intuitively on the market, that's what makes them successful. As they get older, they take the mistakes of the big companies as a model." Written and unwritten rules develop for processes and the way they work together. People sense these and behave in a system-intelligent way accordingly. "In meetings, therefore, they follow these rules - no matter how nonsensical or purposeful they actually are. Meetings become an end in themselves," says the speaker.

Identify the nature of the problem

All you really have to do is learn to distinguish between a complicated, predictable problem and a complex, surprising one. While the former can be solved in a causal, knowledge-based manner with a clean process and quality management system, the latter requires inventiveness and creativity outside of the regulations. "Whoever drives on two tracks in this sense creates room for success," Vollmer explains.

Thomas Metten, Team Leader Quality Service of Oventrop GmbH & Co. KG, could confirm this through his many years of experience. When Oventrop installed the first CAQ system of Quality Miners, which at that time still operated under the name of Pickert GmbH, in 2003, they believed that from now on they would have the quality of their production perfectly under control. "But that was just the beginning of the journey," says Metten. More than 60,000 inspection plans later, the company has undergone a far-reaching cultural change. In the meantime, not only production but also peripheral areas such as energy management have been firmly integrated into quality management.

Quality arises in the process

"We realized that even the energy manager really just wants to monitor the process," says the quality manager. "And linking energy management to the manufacturing processes is ultimately, as the current energy crisis confirms, enormously important." The goal is to have all processes standardized by 2023. "We have established key figures for everything, identify weak points already in the process and can intervene immediately. This means we know exactly where we stand. We can completely dispense with subsequent controls. If the process runs flawlessly, the end product is also flawless." Metten is firmly convinced that "quality is created in the process."

Dr.-Ing. Alexander Schloske, Senior Expert Quality at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation, was able to back this up with many practical examples from industry: "Focusing on the value-adding processes within the FMEA reduces trivialities and increases the significance." He sees a decisive success factor in making FMEA company- and goal-oriented.

Accordingly, what is true for Oventrop does not have to be equally true for all companies. In the panel discussion, Lars Vollmer stated, "Organic change is always an individual one, depending on the prerequisites of the company and its market conditions." Dr. Benedikt Sommerhoff added: "The situation in a software company is completely different from that of a cleaning service provider."

Meaningfulness creates value

For Sommerhoff, appreciation is the key to a working world that is focused on quality. "Only through appreciation do people find meaning in their work." According to Vollmer, however, this meaning does not have to be artificially imposed from the outside. It is lost when people are kept from working - and is simply there when they are allowed to solve tasks successfully and purposefully. Norman Bücher confirmed these statements in his presentation by explaining: "Only the question of "why" and thus the motives give goals a meaning. If you don't know why you're running, you won't master the big challenges." Harry Keller and Jonas Voss from the Quality Miners team continued this as a central point in their own presentation: "Quality management will only work if we have interdisciplinary units that know why they do something." According to the experts, a holistic approach with clear goals, clear communication, transparency and a project cockpit that can be used to steer things makes even complex projects successful.

The active exchange between practitioners of all stripes was the main focus of this technical congress. "We received enormously good feedback on the Quality Mining Day," said Tobias Brehm, Business Development Manager at Quality Miners. "After this success, we want to make this congress a permanent institution that will continue to dig deep for quality in the years to come."

Source: Quality Miners Ltd.