Kim Archibald has more than a decade of Aerospace & Defense manufacturing experience, gained while working at Boeing Defense, Lockheed Martin, and space startup Virgin Orbit. As a frequent speaker, Kim leverages her industry expertise to help manufacturers navigate their digital transformation journey. She is currently Head of Solution Engineering at iBASEt.
What makes APQP so important is that it provides a framework for focusing on product quality early in the design process and includes the perspective of how production processes affect final component quality.
With so many manufacturers focusing on operational excellence and global competition a given, it is not surprising that quality has become a critical control point. Manufacturers have variously deployed quality control (QC), quality management (QM) and/or quality assurance (QA), or product assurance (PA) in complex discrete manufacturing to drive quality throughout their operations.
Roughly ten years ago Quality Management System (QMS) software was still primarily paper-based, focused strictly on plant floor manufacturing operations. The market began to transform, and along came the term “eQMS” to designate it was “electronic” or did not require the use of paper.