Oracle Quality is an integrated quality management application designed to support manufacturers in the pursuit of total quality management (TQM), zero defects, continuous process improvement (CPI), and ISO 9000 certification. It is designed to support the diverse data collection needs of discrete, repetitive, assemble-to-order, and batch process manufacturers. Oracle Quality helps you manage and distribute critical quality information throughout your organization.
Oracle Quality can help do all of the following:
establish quality standards for products and processes throughout the enterprise
monitor performance relative to established quality standards
identify and track process factors that are affecting product quality
collect information about product defects, their causes, and their related dispositions
ensure that test and inspection instructions are available at the appropriate steps throughout the supply chain for a given product
ensure that the proper tests are performed at the right time and document all test results
alert the appropriate personnel when products do not conform to standards
provide flexible reporting on all aspects of quality management
maintain a shared enterprise-wide repository of quality results
You can designate that specific actions be taken based on the quality results that you collect. You can have Oracle Quality issue alerts and electronic notifications, as well as place jobs, repetitive schedules, items, suppliers, and purchase order lines on hold. For example, you can send an electronic mail notification to a given user or group of users, or put a job on hold when a critical measurement is outside the upper and lower specification limits. You also can associate workflows that you create in Oracle Workflow with Quality actions, and specify that they are automatically initiated based on quality results.
You can define action rules and related actions for any collection element, and copy them to any collection plan containing the collection element. You also can define action rules for collection elements within collection plans, which makes the action rule(s) applicable only when the collection element is used within that plan.
For information on how to set up actions and alerts, see: Defining Collection Element Actions and Defining Collection Plan Element Actions.
Collection plans are similar to test or inspection plans. They contain the collection elements that represent the specific data that you want to collect and report on. Collection plans can include collection elements that collect data on defect types, symptoms, causes, actions, critical measurements, or environmental characteristics, as well as reference information such as item, lot number, serial number, operation, department, subinventory, supplier and customer. You also can specify target values and limits for collection plan elements, and mandate that certain actions be taken, based on the quality results entered. For example, you can specify that an electronic mail notification be sent when a temperature reaches a certain level.
For information on how to set up and use Collection Plans, see the section on Collection Plans, beginning with: Overview of Collection Plans.
In Oracle Quality, you can define specifications for key characteristics of the products that you produce or the material that you receive from suppliers. Specification describe the requirements of a product.
You can create specifications for items or categories of items by assigning them a group of collection elements and their specification limits. You can also create supplier specifications for items that you receive from specific suppliers. Further, you can create customer specifications specific to the product standards expected by customers. These three types of specifications help ensure that the goods you produce conform to your quality engineering standards and to your customers' quality standards.
For information on how to set up and use specifications, see the section on Specifications, beginning with: Overview of Specifications.
To be able to collect quality data using Oracle Quality, you need to set up a data collection structure referred to as a "collection plan." Collection plans consist of "collection elements," which are the basic building blocks of collection plans, and determine the data the plan will collect and report. You can define an unlimited number of collection elements for attributes such as defect, disposition, severity, cause, pass/fail results, or for variables such as voltage, resistance, temperature, or acidity. For each collection element that you create, you can specify a list of acceptable values or specification limits such as target value and upper and lower limits.
For information on how to set up and use collection elements, see the section on Collection Elements, beginning with: Overview of Collection Elements.
You can enter results into the quality data repository:
directly, See: Entering Quality Results Directly.
as you perform transactions
See:Quality Data Collection During Transactions and Transactional Data Collection Fundamentals.
by importing quality results from external sources using Collection Import.
You can enter quality results directly at any time. For example, a quality engineer can enter lot sampling results for a collection plan independent of the operator who enters the job completion transaction. The quality engineer can also query and update the quality results that the operator initiated.
If you collect quality data during transactions, you can optionally define quality collection triggers to determine which collection plan to use for a given transaction. For example, you can indicate that you want to use a collection plan called First Pass Yield when entering move transactions for a particular assembly item. Thus, you can control when and where in the transaction process to collect quality data. By making quality data collection a part of the standard workflow, you can distribute quality assurance responsibilities throughout your organization.
You can use Collection Import to import quality data from external systems into the quality data repository. For example, you can import data from sources such as test equipment and gauges. Imported data is validated according to validation rules of the collection plan. Invalid entries are marked so that you can correct and resubmit them. This maintains the integrity of the quality data repository by rejecting invalid item numbers, supplier numbers, and defect codes. The actions that you defined in the collection plan, such as electronic mail notifications, are triggered based on the incoming data.
Oracle Quality provides you with powerful inquiries that enable you to quickly find quality results. You can define your own selection criteria. For example, you can view failure results that are specific to item A54888 and that occurred at operation 10 during May of last year.
You can view quality results using on-line, ad hoc queries and through printed reports. You can also chart your results using trend charts, Pareto charts, control charts, and histograms.
You can save the settings you use to create charts, descriptive statistic views, and custom reports. For example, you can create a Pareto chart that graphically illustrates the top failures for all assemblies on a specific production line. You can then save the settings for this chart. Later, after collecting additional data about failures occurring on this production line, you can re-chart your results.
Furthermore, you can copy the settings that you save for a (source) chart, descriptive statistic view, or custom report to a destination chart, descriptive statistic view, or custom report. Copying setting in this manner allows you to view the same subset of data in different ways. See: Copy Settings.
You can export information for further analysis. Direct database access is facilitated by database views. See: Exporting Quality Results and Collection Plan and Import Results Database Views.
You can also access data directly from the quality data repository with products such as Oracle Discoverer.
Additional Information: See also Oracle E-Business Suite Support Implications for Discoverer 11gR1, My Oracle Support Knowledge Document Doc ID 2277369.1.