Analysis and modelling of cost of quality in aircraft tailplane assembly

With production quality playing a more and more important role in keeping the competitive power of company, Cost of Quality (CoQ) are paid more and more attention in manufacturing industries. Especially in aircraft manufacturing industry, due to the more stringent requirements on quality, the CoQ has been a serious issue for manager. However, due to the specificity of the industry, such as high-tech, low-volume, low degree of automation, the traditional generic CoQ models are not applied directly which make most of the aircraft manufacturing companies are lack of systematic method and efficient tool to analysis and manage CoQ. it is essential to develop a CoQ model which can be used to analyse and estimate the CoQ in the aircraft manufacturing industry. This research aims at developing a CoQ model for tailplane assembly which can help the quality manager to collect and store the quality issue and cost information, and estimate the CoQ and analyse the benefit of cost spent on quality. The CoQ elements are identified and defined based on the comparing results of the literature and actual operation data. Prevention-Appraisal-Failure (P-A-F)/ Activity-Based-Costing (ABC) system is applied to develop the CoQ estimation system. And Cost-Benefit-Analysis (CBA) is applied to analyse the benefit brought by the cost spend on quality. In order to collect enough professional data for the model, an industry survey is designed. Moreover, some GUIs are designed using VBA in MS Excel to improve the operability and practicability. Furthermore, two different cases and expert judgements are used to validate the developed CoQ model. The validation result illustrates that the developed model can help the user to estimate and analyse the CoQ in tailplane assembly, and supply a method to analyse quality issues quantitatively. And the overall performance of the model is approved by the experts in aircraft industry. The model is suit for aircraft industry and worth popularizing in this field.