| Popis: |
Quality assurance functions are mostly discharged today by a department directly reporting to the business management. A characteristic of the tasks of quality assurance is that these tasks can only be fulfilled in close co-operation with all the other functional divisions of a business. This results in the need for an intensive information exchange among these divisions. The production department and the quality assurance department, in particular, must be able to have access to data bases of mutual interest. In this relation to the purchasing, development, design engineering, and production departments, the quality assurance department primarily has a service function, in that it puts information on quality problems into the right shape and makes available this information in time. The in-house computer networks (LAN) developed in recent years constitute an important prerequisite for realizing this function. Moreover, efforts are being made to create interface standards (MAP, ISO-OSI ) for computer communication, permitting the integration of computers of various manufacturers into a common network. It is also the task of the quality assurance department to see to it that complaints and defects reported by costumers - field information just as in-house information - will be communicated to the appropriate departments. Big firms have solved this task technically in part of computer systems linking selected customer-service bases with the internal quality assurance operations. However, not until a standardized public communications network (ISDN) is installed will realization of this function be all supported in smaller enterprises. The outlined developments in the field of computer communications alone will not, however, bring about an improvement in the integration of quality information into the internal information flow as long as no suitable solutions are provided in terms of organization and quality engineering. This contribution is intended to demonstrate way s |
