Even the most well designed products fail. Being able to document this failure and plan ways to address it in the future is one of the impost important elements of the design process. The Quality Management System (QMS) application introduces a couple of important documents that make it possible to create and maintain Failure Mode Effects Analyses (FMEAs) for both the design of your products (DFMEA) and for the process of assembling your products (PFMEA).

Overview

Preventive Actions

There are two primary ItemTypes responsible for planning and tracking the preventive actions you may take to address failures in your products. These are the Design Quality Document (DQD) and Process Quality Document (PQD). Both of these documents are built using the Content Modelling Framework (CMF) which means that the content of these documents is fully configurable should you want to add or remove some fields from them.

Design Quality Document

The DQD is intended to track information on how the actual design of the product could result in failure. Perhaps in a stress test a particularly thin piece of your product breaks, this would be something you'd want to track in your DQDs.

Process Quality Document

The PQD is intended to track information on the manufacturing process of your products. In fact, PQDs can be linked directly to a Process Plan item if you're also using the Manufacturing Process Plan application. The PQD also comes with a few different views to help you visualize your process. The first one you'll see is the Process Control Plan, and it is intended to just provide a general overview of each step in your assembly.

Another helpful view is the Process FMEA which helps you track potential issues with the steps in your process such as a bolt being made too tight or too loose during assembly. 

Corrective Actions

While preventing any potential issues is important, it's equally important to have a system in place to correct any issues that are found after your product is released and in use. QMS ships with a Corrective Action Plan (CAP) ItemType for tracking just this kind of information.

Corrective Action Plan

The CAP comes with a few standard relationships for tracking information like what event caused the failure, how the failure can be contained, analysis of the failure, how the failure will be corrected, and how the failure can be prevented in the future. 

Installation

QMS can be easily installed using the Aras Update utility. Once you've installed Aras Update, you can open it to see a complete list of the applications available for installation. From this list, we can select Quality Management System and choose to install 12.0R1. After clicking install, you should be taken to a page like the one below.

For most applications, you'll want to make sure that all of these boxes are checked so that you are installing each piece of the application. In the case of QMS, you may need to uncheck the Optional Office Connector Settings. If you don't have the Office Connector installed, you will receive an error that will prevent you from installing QMS. Click Next after checking if you have the Office Connector installed to go to the logging configuration screen below.

Select Detailed logging. In the event that there is an error during the installation, this will make it easier to diagnose what caused the installation to fail. After selecting this, click Next.

On this screen, fill in the information about your Aras Innovator instance.

  • Install Path – The folder in your codetree that contains the InnovatorServerConfig.xml
    • By default, this will be C:Program Files (x86)ArasInnovatorInnovator
  • Server URL – The URL you use to connect to your innovator instance
    • By default, this will be http://localhost/InnovatorServer
  • Database – The name of the database connected to this Innovator instance
    • By default, this will be InnovatorSolutions
  • Username – Enter root here which is the name of the Super User
    • You may need to temporarily enable login for this user before installing QMS. Once the installation is completed, we recommend disabling this user again
  • Password – Enter the password for root

Click Install and wait a few minutes for the installation to complete. Once the installation is complete, you can log in to the database as an administrator to do an extra check that the installation completed successfully. Navigate to TOC > Administration > Variables and confirm that there is a variable called Quality Management System.

Conclusion

With that, you should be all set to start using the Aras Quality Management System. If you're interested in customizing the DQD or PQD, check out our blog that covers the Content Modeling Framework in depth. If you have a suggestion for the next application we should cover, leave a comment below.