Article
What makes a quality product?
Solid quality management for OEMs
For OEMs, high-quality components are crucial for ensuring energy- and cost-efficient operations of their products. Yet, boilers and heating pumps are made of a variety of components. This puts manufacturers in a complex position: to minimise the risk of breakdown and complications, they need to guarantee quality in every single component of the end product.
The 5 steps of solid quality management
High quality is not only important for operational excellence. It plays a major role in advancing brand value, avoiding unnecessary costs, keeping an efficient innovation success rate, and maintaining customer satisfaction.
Quality needs to be mirrored in the entire value chain. But where does it start and (where) does it end? Find out about the five steps of a solid quality management process.
Quality is at the heart of our organisation
- Innovation: To build a foundation to learn from and come up with new ideas, data and information at hand is used as much as possible – Including both, historic data and real-time data, gathered with the help of intelligent technologies, such as the UMP3 and UPM4.
- Design and Development: OEMs need every component of their products to be as specific and tailored to their needs as possible. This is why design and development undergo an in-depth and critical testing phase, including product development specifications and stress test requirements.
- Production: During the production stage, high production and assembly requirements are ensured, based on certifications and detailed industry requirements.
- Delivery: It is not enough to have a high-quality product. Having a high-quality, structured forecasting approach is essential to meet tough on-time-delivery requirements.
- Returns: All returned pumps are analysed to learn and improve the quality of future designs. Think of a returned pump as a documentation tool. Running for 10-15 years, the condition of the pipe can be analysed and valuable insights for the future developments of pumps can be gained.
Knowledge sharing across the value chain
OEMs can find Grundfos split up into a dedicated setup of 5 OEM-certified factories. This ensures operational excellence and customised expertise in a local setting. OEMs connect directly to a local specialist to receive a qualified, customised answer to their questions.
For requests that require an in-depth analysis of products and for the development of new products, the HVAC OEM HQ and the Grundfos Group use the knowledge shared between the divisions and customer feedback to incorporate it into learnings for future innovations.
To be one step ahead, a dedicated knowledge sharing setup is important. This includes having systems and processes in place to discover issues and take corrective action in real-time. This keeps our customers up-to-date on all ongoing requests in real-time.
In fact, our flapper valve has been a result of responding quickly to leakages and seizing, caused by frictions in the valve – now saving a lot of HVACs’ and installers’ time, previously needed for the maintenance and control of the valve.
A day-to-day quality setup
What lies at the heart of quality management is the close cooperation with all stakeholders in every step of the innovation process. Whether it is historic data, years of industry experience, rigorous attention to detail and feedback, or a combination of it all, maintaining close contact with customers is essential to optimise every possible component of the OEM division.
Forward-looking and systemic quality management helps OEMs prevent downtime, minimise delivery delays and foresee innovation risk as well as potential complications in the installation and maintenance of their products.