TQM Tools Interview Questions and Answers:

1. What is benchmark?

Ans. Benchmarking is a systematic search for best practices, innovative ideas and highly effective operating procedure.

2. What are the benefits of benchmarking?

Ans.

  • Benchmarking allows goals to be set objectively, based on external information.
  • It is time and cost effective.

3. State the process involved in benchmarking?

Ans.

  • Decide what to benchmark
  • Understand current performance
  • Plan
  • Study others
  • Learn from the data
  • Use the findings

4. What are the types of benchmarking?

Ans.

  • Internal
  • Competitive
  • Process

5. What is the process benchmarking?

Ans. Process benchmarking is something known as functional or generic benchmarking, where many process are common across industry boundaries and innovations from other types of organizations can be applied across industries.

6. What are the two ways to prove that one practice is superior to other?

Ans.

  • If the processes being compared are clearly understood and adequate performance measures are available, the practice may be analyzed quantitatively.
  • Second way to prove superiority is through market analysis where the consumers of the product vote with their checkbooks.

7. What are the steps for development and execution of action plans?

Ans.

  • Specify tasks
  • Sequence tasks
  • Determine resource needs
  • Establish task schedule
  • Assign responsibilities for each task
  • Describe expected results
  • Specify methods for monitoring results

8. What is QFD?

Ans. QFD is a planning tool used to fulfill customer expectations; it is a disciplined approach to product design, engineering, and production and provides in-depth evaluation of a product. The organization that constantly implements QFD can improve engineering knowledge, productivity and quality and reduce cost, product development cost and engineering changes.

9. How QFD can be deployed?

Ans. QFD can be deployed, through

  • Product planning
  • Part development
  • Process planning
  • Production planning
  • Service industries

10. What is QFD team?

Ans. Team is composed of members from marketing, design, quality, finance and production. The existing production team usually has lesser numbers because the QFD team will only need to be modified.

11. What are the benefits of QFD ?

Ans.

  • Improves customer satisfaction
  • Reduces implementation time
  • Promotes team work
  • Provides documentation

12. What are the important tools in QFD process?

Ans.

  • Team
  • Time
  • Inter team communication
  • Team meetings

13. What are the ways in which customer information can be collected?

Ans.

  • Solicited, measurable and routine data found by customer survey, market survey and trade trials.
  • Unsolicited, measurable and routine data to be taken from customer complaints or law suits.
  • Solicited, subjective and routine data are usually gathered from focus groups.
  • Solicited, subjective and haphazard data obtained from trade visits, independent consultants.
  • Unsolicited, subjective and haphazard data obtained from conventions, vendors and suppliers.

14. What are the methods available for QFD team to process the information?

Ans.

  • Affinity diagram
  • Interrelationship diagram
  • Tree diagram
  • Cause and effect diagram

15. When affinity diagram should be implemented?

Ans. The affinity diagram can be used when

  • Thoughts are too widely dispersed or numerous to organize.
  • New solutions are needed to circumvent the more traditional ways of problem solving.
  • Support for solution is essential for successful implementation.

16. What are the steps involved in constructing affinity diagram?

Ans.

  • Phrase the objective
  • Record all the responses
  • Group the responses
  • Organize the group in affinity diagram

17. Define house of quality?

Ans. The primary planning tool used in QFD is the House Of Quality. It translates the voice of the customers into design requirements that meets specific target values and matches those against how an organization meets those requirements.

18. What are the parts of House of Quality?

Ans.

  • Exterior wall of the house are customer requirements.
  • Ceiling of the house contains technical descriptor.
  • Interior walls of the house are relationships between customer requirements and technical descriptor.
  • Roof of the house is the interrelationship between technical descriptors.
  • Foundation is prioritized technical descriptors.

19. What are the steps involved in building House of Quality?

Ans.

  • List customer requirements (WHATs)
  • List technical descriptors (HOWs)
  • Develop relationship matrix between WHATs and HOWs.
  • Develop interrelationship matrix between HOWs.
  • Competitive assessment.
  • Develop prioritized customer requirements.
  • Develop prioritized technical descriptors.

20. What are the benefits of implementing QFD?

Ans.

  • An orderly way of obtaining information and presenting it.
  • Shorter product development cycle
  • Considerably reduced start up costs
  • Fewer engineering changes
  • Reduced chances of oversight during design process
  • Environment of team work
  • Consensus decisions
  • Everything is preserved in writing

21. What are the key metrics need to be compared during benchmarking investigation?

Ans.

  • Unit cost
  • Hourly rates
  • Asset measures
  • Quality measures

22. What are the 5 key business drivers?

Ans.

  • Customer satisfaction
  • Operational performance
  • Financial performance
  • Community service
  • Team member safety, satisfaction and development.

23. Give the equation of quadratic loss function

Ans.

L = k(y-Ï„)2

Where

  • L = cost incurred as quality deviates from the target
  • y = performance characteristics
  • Ï„ = target
  • k = quality loss coefficient = A/(y-z)2 = A/Δ2
  • A = Loss of the customer when deviation is Δ

24. Give the equation of average or expected loss.

Ans. Ã… = k [σ2 + (? – Ï„)2 ]

Where

  • L = the average or expected loss
  • σ = standard division
  • y = performance
  • z = target
  • k = quality loss coefficient

25. What are the overall goals of TPM?

Ans.

  • Maintaining and improving equipment capacity.
  • Maintaining equipment for life.
  • Using support from all areas of the operation.
  • Encouraging input from all employees.
  • Using teams for continuous improvement.

26. What is the framework for TPM?

Ans. Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is an extension of the Total Quality Management (TQM) philosophy to the maintenance function. Seven basic steps get an organization started toward TPM:

  • Management learns the new philosophy.
  • Management promotes the new philosophy.
  • Training is funded and developed for everyone in the organization.
  • Areas of needed improvement are identified.
  • Performance goals are formulated.
  • An implementation plan is developed.
  • Autonomous work groups are established.

27. What are the six major losses?

Ans.

Downtime Losses

1. Planned

  • Start-ups
  • Shift changes
  • Coffee and lunch breaks
  • Planned maintenance shutdowns

2. Unplanned Downtime

  • Equipment breakdown
  • Changeovers
  • Lack of material
  • Reduced Speed Losses

3. Idling and minor stoppages

4. Slow-downs

  • Poor Quality Losses

5. Process nonconformities

6. Scrap

28. How the downtime losses are measured?

Ans. Downtime losses are measured by equipment availability using the equation

A = (T/P) x 100

Where

  • A = availability
  • T = operating time(P-D)
  • P = planned operating time
  • D = downtime

29. How the reduced speed losses are measured?

Ans. Reduced speed losses are measured by tracking performance efficiency using the equation

E = ((C x N) / T) x 100

Where

  • E = performance efficiency
  • C = theoretical cycle time
  • N = processed amount(quantity)
  • T = operating time (P-D)

30. How the poor quality losses are measured?

Ans. Poor quality losses are measured by tracking the rate of quality products produced using the equation

R = ((N-Q) / N) x 100

Where

  • R = rate of quality products,
  • N = processed amount(quality),
  • Q = nonconformities

31. What is the formula for measuring Equipment effectiveness?

Ans. Equipment effectiveness is measured as the product of the decimal equipment of the three previous metrics using the equation

EE = A x E x R

Where

  • EE = equipment effectiveness, or overall equipment effectiveness(OEE)
  • A = Availability
  • E = performance efficiency
  • R = late of quality products

32. Explain FMEA.

Ans. Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) is an analytical technique that combines the technology and experience of people in identifying foreseeable failure modes of a product or process and planning for its elimination. In other words, FMEA can be explained as a group of activities intended to Recognize and evaluate the potential failure of a product or process and its effects. Identify actions that could eliminate or reduce the chance of potential failures. Document the process.

33. Give the reliability of the product.

Ans. Failure of a product is expressed as periods of failure can be modeled by an exponential distribution. The probability of survival of this type of product using an exponential distribution may be expressed as

Rt = e-tλ = et/θ

Where

  • Rt = the reliability or probability of survival
  • t = the time specified for operation without failure
  • λ = the failure rate
  • θ = the mean time to failure

34. What are the failure categories of a product?

Ans.

  • Debug
  • Chance
  • Wear out

35. Give four benefits of design FMEA.

Ans.

  • Having a systematic review of component failure modes to ensure that any failure produces minimal damage to the product or process.
  • Determining the effects that any failure will have on other items in the products or process and their functions.
  • Establishing test program requirements to determine failure mode and rate data not available from other sources.
  • Establishing test program requirements to verify empirical reliability predictions.