Quality improvement has stalled in manufacturing due to an inability to capture, continuously improve, and leverage performance knowledge in design and manufacturing activities. Other enterprise systems, such as project life-cycle management (PLM), fail to improve quality because they treat it as a process management problem. The fundamental challenges to achieving quality are knowledge-management and continuous-improvement issues. Recently, quality life-cycle management has received a boost from enterprise software solutions designed to change how manufacturers go about designing quality into their manufacturing processes and products.

Some statistics reported by manufacturers highlight the current dilemma in quality performance:

• Eighty percent of all quality issues are repeat issues. These are errors that have happened before and were fixed, yet the lesson learned wasn’t recalled by or communicated to another group so that preventive action could be taken.

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