Three-step wire and cable management

Electric wires and cables are known as the nerves and blood vessels of the national economy, a metaphor that aptly describes their role as indispensable basic materials for transmitting electricity, conveying information, and manufacturing various motors, instruments, and meters, enabling electromagnetic energy conversion. They are essential basic products in the future electrified and information-based society. Indeed, as a supporting industry for the national economy, electric wires and cables are ubiquitous, with extremely wide applications across industries such as electricity, construction, communications, and manufacturing, closely related to all sectors of the national economy.

Precisely because electric wires and cables are so widely used and hold such an important position, their quality is crucial to the healthy development of the national economy. It's no exaggeration to say that the quality of electric wires and cables is a matter of life and death. However, the reality is not optimistic; in recent years, quality problems in electric wires and cables have been emerging one after another, making them a 'disaster area' for quality issues.

For the electric wire and cable industry to develop healthily, it must first address quality issues. Quality management in electric wire and cable enterprises and the improvement of product quality are of paramount importance to promoting the healthy development of these enterprises, improving China's economic performance, and enhancing the quality of citizens' lives. To improve the product quality of electric wire and cable enterprises, it is necessary to equip these enterprises with scientific quality management theories and methods. The Juran quality spiral model, proposed by the famous American quality management expert, J. M. Juran, is used to characterize the entire process and regularity of product quality formation. The entire process includes 13 stages: market research, product development, design, production technology preparation, manufacturing plan formulation, procurement, test instrument configuration, manufacturing, process control, inspection, testing, sales, and after-sales service. These 13 stages constitute a system. The achievement of system goals depends on the implementation of quality functions at each stage and the coordination between stages. Any error in a single stage will lead to a decline in product quality and an increase in costs. Using a quality management model will help with quality management in the production process of wires and cables, enhancing the control, guidance, and participation functions of various functional departments in production management.

The quality management of electric wires and cables involves every aspect, from design and production to after-sales service. Let's discuss each step one by one. First, let's discuss quality management in the design process of wires and cables. The design process of wires and cables includes collecting product intelligence, conducting market research and forecasting, and investigating and analyzing internal and external production conditions of the enterprise; sample design phase; sample trial production phase, which includes trial production preparation and trial production, and trial production appraisal; small batch trial production phase; and mass production phase. In the past, people often mistakenly believed that product quality could be guaranteed as long as the inspection was strictly controlled. Later, people realized that product quality is not inspected, but manufactured during the production process. This marked a leap in people's understanding of product quality.

With the development of modern enterprise management, people have also discovered that product quality is not only manufactured but, more importantly, designed. Practice has fully shown that product design quality is an innate intrinsic quality. This is another leap in people's understanding of product quality. The collection and analysis technology of quality information and quality intelligence are the basis for developing new products, and they are extremely important for the success or failure of developing new products. Enterprises should establish a technical intelligence and quality information system to manage and use various technical intelligence and quality information comprehensively and uniformly. Setting quality goals, quality goals are generally proposed in the "quality plan" and specifically reflected in the "scheme design." Quality evaluation activities are a key function in product design and development quality management activities. Quality evaluation activities run through the entire product design and development process. Quality cost analysis, the purpose of conducting quality cost analysis is to reduce the cost of new products under the premise of ensuring the achievement of new product quality goals to obtain better economic benefits. Arranging "early warning," when developing products, adopting various methods such as review, testing, analysis, and evaluation as a means of detecting faults is called "early warning."

Doing a good job of quality management in the design process of electric wires and cables is only the first step; the next step is quality management in the production process. Quality control in the production process of electric wires and cables is to verify and inspect according to the requirements of the production plan form, process flow card, and operating procedures. There are many forms of inspection. Inspection is performed on the first or first few products processed at the beginning of each shift or after a process change. Generally, 3-5 consecutively produced products are inspected; only after passing inspection can the subsequent products be processed. Patrol inspection is a full inspection of the workshop process by the quality inspector. It is considered that important processes and materials should have increased inspection frequency, and problems occur in an instant. Example: When worker A is engaged in normal production of stranded wires, the inspector measures the conductor outer diameter and finds that the outer diameter has shrunk. At this time, the inspector should be familiar with the process regulations, and it's time to perform. If the outer diameter becomes smaller, causing the resistance to exceed the standard, the worker should be stopped and it should be checked whether this is due to the small single-wire diameter or the equipment, as the first-piece inspection meets the requirements. Find the cause, perform classification statistics, and make improvements. Therefore, it is still necessary to urge the operators to be familiar with the process regulations and check the implementation status; if patrol inspection is not timely, it will also lead to batch failures.

The quality management of after-sales service for electric wires and cables is equally important. Service quality is difficult to define, the fundamental reason being the particularity of the service itself. People's grasp of service quality is subjective, making it difficult to define service quality uniformly. Its particularity is reflected in: service is an intangible product, it is non-physical; the production, exchange, and consumption of services are simultaneous. Based on these characteristics, the following points should be considered when defining service quality: service quality must be a measure of the degree of satisfaction of service needs; service quality must be distinguished from physical quality; service quality must reflect the essential attributes of the service; service quality is mainly related to the subjective feelings of customers; service quality includes the provider's evaluation of the service.

Improving the industry's development level requires ensuring product quality; therefore, improving management innovation capabilities requires improving enterprise product standards and quality, laying a solid foundation for ensuring product quality. On the one hand, it is necessary to establish enterprise quality management systems, and on the other hand, it is also necessary to continuously improve them. Continuously improving the quality management system is the eternal task of enterprise standardization.