“Low-code greatly reduces the threshold for application development, allowing people without professional development skills to participate in the construction of applications. Development methods such as Java require knowledge of a specific programming language, but low-code does not require expertise in this area. Three key aspects of low-code application development: building user interfaces in an intuitive and templated manner, graphically designing business logic, and mapping databases to application information flows.

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By: Sebastian Bersch, Director of Global Industry Marketing, Mendix Corporation

Quality Management (QM) is a critical business process for companies, without it, companies cannot consistently produce high-quality products that meet customer expectations. As businesses transform and customers demand increased product configurability, having an agile quality management process is more important than ever. This article will address enterprise quality management, the need to implement an agile quality management process, and the value of low-code application development.

What is quality management and why is it important?

Quality management is the process a business deploys to ensure product quality meets customer expectations and design specifications and regulatory requirements. Whereas the previous quality management process referred to establishing and conducting inspection mechanisms at the production stage, the starting point of the process has now been moved forward to the engineering design stage. In the requirements management process, companies confirm that the current product design and production process can meet the requirements of a specific product, and that the finished product has a stable, consistent quality.

Quality management also includes operational risk and failure mode analysis during the design phase to achieve the required stability for product validation and associated manufacturing processes. Companies must also be able to track defects in the production process or subsequently discovered, and this needs to be complemented by cost analysis, so that when analyzing the problem, you can obtain a clear ROI and effective solutions, and finally make an informed decision based on the problem report.

Small batch production is shrinking across all industries, and customers expect businesses to listen and respond to users. Therefore, quality management needs to be able to flexibly and agilely control potential problems, develop inspection plans, and guide production, rather than rigidly sticking to factory-specific processes, quality inspection gates, or the work of quality inspectors.

Why is it difficult for enterprises to achieve agile quality management?

Few companies will customize a quality management system (QMS), and generally choose to purchase an off-the-shelf QMS that can cover about 80% of their needs, but these systems are often unable to adapt to the company’s distinctive processes. The market size of quality management systems is much smaller than that of manufacturing execution systems or product life cycle management software. The key reason is that most of the purchases of quality management systems by enterprises are one-time buyouts, which also means that it is difficult to have follow-up long-term maintenance services.

While providing a good return on investment in a short period of time, the value of such an off-the-shelf quality management system can quickly depreciate. For example, if a business purchased a new factory during a restructuring and moved its business model to a different product line, it may not be appropriate to use the existing system. Another example is that the enterprise had deployed the QMS at that time several years before the release of several major new software. The new functions released after many years caused the enterprise to be unable to use all the new functions due to the version limitation, which eventually led to the maintenance of 20% of the QMS every year. Fei basically “wasted”.

When companies accumulate technical debt using an off-the-shelf QMS, they face a difficult choice: whether to overhaul their previous system or build an entirely new QMS to new specifications, but each choice comes with its own risks. Fortunately, this problem finally has a solution.

How does low code make quality management agile?

Low-code greatly reduces the threshold for application development, allowing people without professional development skills to participate in the construction of applications. Development methods such as Java require knowledge of a specific programming language, but low-code does not require expertise in this area. Three key aspects of low-code application development: building user interfaces in an intuitive and templated manner, graphically designing business logic, and mapping databases to application information flows.

Through low-code, companies can empower quality managers to build applications that cover processes that were not previously covered. For example, when a business needs to cover processes that cannot be handled by an off-the-shelf QMS, such as integrating a model-based systems engineering approach into risk assessment of production processes, etc. However, organizations often overlook these rapidly improving quality management processes in their digital transformation initiatives because of the cost, time, and complexity involved in building applications. With the help of low-code, citizen developers with the right toolset can build a prototype of the required application in a few days. Direct participation in the creation of the application can not only improve employee participation and willingness to use, but also help in the management process change. key step.

Low-code helps enterprises achieve agile quality management

Frequent changes in business models or product requirements require more attention to quality management, a key process. Low-code application development provides enterprises and employees with appropriate toolkits and technologies, reducing the high cost of improving the agility of quality management processes. investment costs while reducing the time and approval process required to achieve this.