A Different View of Quality Assurance for Fatigue Loaded Structures

Paper in proceeding, 2013

The basic purpose with quality assurance is to get information about the product or the process in order to make correct decisions. Research performed in the WIQ-project has shown that the insufficient use of that information leads to unnecessary and costly safety margins in each step of production. The outmost consequences of that could be reduced productivity and lost opportunities for product and process development, such as implementing light weight designs. The former focus of the quality assurance at the investigated industries has been of technical character. A need for a different view has been identified. By instead starting with the internal customer’s need for information in mind, the drawbacks of the currently used systems could be avoided. A model has been developed based on the internal customer’s need for information about the product or the process. Several aspects are highlighted, such as what information is needed and suitable ways to present that information.