FORWISS

BAVARIAN RESEARCH CENTER FOR KNOWLEDGE-BASED SYSTEMS

Cost Effectiveness of Qualityand Environment Management Measures

Field of work:

The project WIQUM (Wirtschaftlichkeit von Qualitäts- und Umweltmanagement-Methoden) is a cooperation of four institutes and departments of universities: The Lehrstuhl für Qualitätsmananagement und Fertigungsmesstechnik, Erlangen, the Lehrstuhl für Informationstechnik im Maschinenwesen, Garching, the Institut für Management und Umwelt, Augsburg and the Bavarian Research Center for Knowledge-Based Systems work together in this project. The Information Systems Research Group of the Bavarian Research Center for Knowledge-Based Systems cooperates with COI GmbH, Herzogenaurach, a 100% subsidiary company of INA Wälzlager Schaeffler oHG, Herzogenaurach. Goals The goal of the cooperating institutes and universities is to create a methodology of appraising the profitability of a quality- or eco-management-method before applying it to a real-world company. The goal of the Information Systems Research Group of the Bavarian Research Center for Knowledge-Based Systems in the WIQUM-project is to build a workflow-management application that allows a company to gather detailed cost information of after-sales-processes. Furthermore, these data are correlated with costs in the research and production departments. The problem in many enterprises is, that neither the controlling-department nor the management knows about costs of failures some customers complain about. By the (semi-)automated gathering of process-data, the to-be-built workflow-application is aimed to support the management in its decisions, whether a quality-management-method is necessary and justified to reduce the cost of failures. To achieve this, the management and the controlling department get (next to other important process information) condensed cost data (activity-based costing) gathered from the whole company. Further goals are measuring and increasing customer satisfaction (the latter by improvement of service) improvement of process security in the after-sales-phase job-enrichment of the after-sales-staff increasing flexibilty of a company.