Designing a Service Parts Quality System for Rapid Customer Response

The objective of the thesis is to provide a framework for understanding and improving service parts quality management in a high technology industry. The research carried out during the internship is used as a case study for understanding and improving service parts quality management. The semiconductor capital equipment industry is primarily technology driven and is highly competitive. Capital equipment tools are extremely complex, because there are thousands of individual parts that have to be assembled and integrated. Service part usage is low volume and failures are relatively infrequent and unpattemed. This creates many difficulties in analyzing and understanding the failure data that drives factory quality improvement activity. There are two major types of quality management systems: ones that address quality problems and ones that prevent quality problems. The first piece is centered on managing immediate customer complaints. The scope of this research covers the day-to-day management of immediate quality issues. The approach in attacking this problem is to discover the key failure modes that affect the current quality system. Two major tasks shed light on the key failure modes of the service parts quality system. The task of analyzing data to prioritize work and the task of working through several customer complaints reveal the key failure modes facing the company. Three key failure modes are identified. First, quality data analysis in the service part business environment is especially challenging, making it difficult to establish work priorities. Secondly, there is no formal customer input into factory quality work prioritization. Finally, unclear ownership for quality issues hampers progress in resolving these issues. By considering these key failure modes one can learn ways to improve the day-to-day service parts quality management. Given the key failure modes, the objective is to design a new process around parts quality that is robust to these failure modes. Given the complex business environment, the service parts quality system should be geared towards customer responsiveness on specific issues. The major challenge is to structure service parts quality management such that prioritization is simple, factory and customer needs are aligned, and issues are resolved quickly. The purpose of the thesis will be to develop the failure mode approach stated above and to illustrate that this approach can be applied in many business environments that are similar to this environment. Finally, this company is not the only company facing a complex manufacturing environment. One could imagine that many service part businesses face similar challenges to the ones that this particular company faces. By focusing on the three failure modes we can infer that some concepts could readily transfer to other industries.