PM 587 Week 5 Complexity and Quality Assurance Example

Twenty-Two Part Numbers, Four Organizations and One Cure Cycle: Managing Complexity and Assuring Quality in a Composite Panel Launch

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

PM/587: Project Risk Management and Quality Assurance

Week 5 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Plainsview Aerostructures, its customer, suppliers, processes and figures are composites written for a model paper.

Plainsview Aerostructures, the composite Wichita supplier followed in PM 587, is four months into its panel launch. Responses from Week 4 are in place, the four largest drawings arrived early and process qualification has begun. The launch now faces a different kind of risk: as parts, tools and organizations multiply, so do the ways a defect can slip in. This paper analyzes the project's complexity and designs quality assurance to match it.

Dimensions of Complexity

Geraldi et al. (2011) reviewed research on project complexity and identified several dimensions: structural complexity, from the number and interdependence of elements; uncertainty; dynamics, from change over time; pace; and socio-political complexity, from the people and organizations involved. Three are prominent at Plainsview.

Structural: 22 part numbers, 31 production tools, about 1,400 distinct ply shapes and 9 bonded subassemblies. Each part has its own layup sequence, cure recipe and inspection plan.

Dynamic: the customer is still issuing engineering changes, about four a month, mostly small changes to fastener locations and edge trims. Each change must flow to drawings, tools, ply kits, inspection plans and work instructions.

Socio-political and organizational: four organizations, Plainsview, the customer, the prepreg supplier and the tool builder, each with its own quality system, and within Plainsview, a launch team working beside an established military program with different procedures.

How Complexity Becomes Defects

Each dimension has a typical failure path. Structural complexity raises the chance of a ply placed in the wrong orientation or sequence, a mistake invisible once the part is cured. Dynamic complexity raises the chance that a workstation uses an outdated drawing or ply kit after a change. Organizational complexity raises the chance that requirements are lost between quality systems, for example a prepreg lot certified to the supplier's format but missing a value the customer requires.

Assurance Versus Control

The current standard distinguishes quality assurance, focused on the processes that produce deliverables, from quality control, which examines the deliverables themselves (Project Management Institute [PMI], 2021). In composite manufacturing the distinction matters more than usual because curing is a special process: a finished panel cannot be fully verified by inspection, since internal defects such as porosity are only partly detectable by ultrasonic testing and many process errors leave no visible trace. Assurance must therefore act on the process.

Quality Assurance Design

The design follows the aerospace industry's quality management standard, which Plainsview is certified to, and adds launch-specific practices.

Qualified cure recipes: each part's cure cycle is qualified with test panels, and the recipe is locked in the autoclave controller so it cannot be edited without engineering approval.

Process monitoring: thermocouples on every part record temperature through the cure; records are reviewed before a part moves on, and statistical charts track ramp rates and dwell temperatures to catch drift before it produces defects.

Error-proofing in layup: laser projection shows each ply's outline and orientation on the tool, and a technician scans each ply's label before placing it, so the system flags a ply out of sequence.

Revision control: engineering changes are released through a single system that updates drawings, ply kits and inspection plans together and removes superseded documents from workstations the same day.

Supplier assurance: incoming prepreg lots are checked against a requirements matrix combining the supplier's certification with the customer's specification.

A cured panel keeps its mistakes inside; assurance has to catch them before the autoclave door closes.

Complexity at the Interfaces Between Organizations

The organizational dimension deserves separate treatment because the four quality systems do not share a language. The customer's specification calls a ply-orientation tolerance by one name and the prepreg supplier's certificate by another; the tool builder reports tool dimensions in a format the coordinate measuring machine cannot import directly. Each mismatch is a small chance for an error to pass unnoticed. Plainsview appointed one quality engineer as the interface owner for each external organization, responsible for translating requirements, holding a monthly call with the counterpart and keeping a shared list of open questions. In the first two months the list held 23 items, most resolved within a week, and two would have caused nonconformances at first article inspection if left alone.

Training as Assurance

People are part of the process. Technicians on the launch receive training on each new part family before they lay it up, using a qualification panel rather than a production part, and must be signed off by a lead technician. Training records are linked to the layup system, which will not open a part's work instructions for a technician who has not been signed off on that family. This turns a training rule into a control that cannot be skipped when the schedule is tight.

Layered Audits

Supervisors audit three layup stations a day against a short checklist; the quality engineer audits each part number's process once a month; and the customer's source inspector conducts a process audit before first article inspection. Findings go to the daily production meeting.

Measures

First-pass yield by part number, target 92 percent by month 20.

Escapes, defects found by the customer, target zero.

Engineering change implementation time, from release to all workstations, target two working days.

Cost of quality, with prevention and appraisal tracked against internal and external failure.

Kaynak (2003) studied manufacturing firms and found that quality management practices were related to operational performance, which in turn influenced financial and market performance, supporting the view that spending on prevention pays off through better results. In the first two months of qualification, prevention and appraisal spending was about $310,000, while scrap and rework, internal failure, was about $140,000, well below the $400,000 the team had budgeted.

Learning Loops

Every defect is traced to its cause with a short problem-solving form, and causes are reviewed weekly. Two recurring causes in the first months, ply labels peeling in the freezer and a missing trim note after a customer change, led to a new label stock and an added check in the change release workflow. Lessons are added to the launch lessons log for the second-source qualification later.

Readiness for First Article Inspection

All of this assurance work converges on first article inspection, when the customer verifies that the production process yields conforming parts. The team runs a dry run on each part number two weeks before the formal inspection, completing the full report package internally and having a quality engineer from the military program, who has not worked on the launch, review it with fresh eyes.

Scaling Down Complexity

Some complexity can be reduced rather than managed. The team asked the customer to approve common edge trims across four similar panels, cutting four tools and simplifying inspection plans.

Conclusion

Plainsview's launch is complex in structure, in pace of change and in the number of organizations involved, and each kind of complexity creates its own path to defects. Process-focused assurance, qualified and locked cure recipes, statistical monitoring, error-proofed layup, single-point revision control and supplier requirements checks, together with layered audits, measures and learning loops, addresses those paths before parts are cured.

References

Geraldi, J., Maylor, H., & Williams, T. (2011). Now, let's make it really complex (complicated): A systematic review of the complexities of projects. International Journal of Operations & Production Management, 31(9), 966-990. https://doi.org/10.1108/01443571111165848

Kaynak, H. (2003). The relationship between total quality management practices and their effects on firm performance. Journal of Operations Management, 21(4), 405-435. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0272-6963(03)00004-4

Project Management Institute. (2021). A guide to the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK guide) (7th ed.). Project Management Institute.