Improvement of the quality department inspection process in a wind blade manufacturing company

• Autor(a) principal: Pereira, Fernanda Mendes
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/38196
• topic: Quality; Bussiness process management; Standard work; Process control; Lean management

The companies are always seeking competitive advantage. With the increase of the competition in the renewable energy sector, the wind energy industry is also looking to improve its processes. Therefore, quality is one of the determining factors for product differentiation. It is important to ensure that all quality controls are carried out rigorously so that it has all the necessary mechanical characteristics and provides the best product for the consumer. This project was developed in a wind energy industry company that was facing new challenges since the discovery of a non-conformity that affected all the blades of a new project in a post-production phase. The goals were to define the best flow for a new inspection process of the group, improve the control and organization of it and the information flow associated to it, not only to improve the quality management control but also to provide the KPIs for the top management. The project followed the case study as research methodology and the BPM cycle as research design along with quality tools, such as the Pareto and Ishikawa diagrams, flowcharts and 5W2H. It also used the lean manufacturing principles to reduce the non-value-added activities. For the KPIs, the automatization of the data was the best option. The BPMN was used to map the process and to propose the new flow. As a result, the devised actions reduced the duration of the process by more than 77% and provide savings averaging approximately 775,00€ per blade. The project improved the organization inside the laboratory, reduced the evaluation errors and provided more real time information for the top management.