A knowledge‐based system as a design aid for quality assurance information systems

The objective of an effective quality assurance system should be to assist a company to satisfy customer needs and expectations while, at the same time, helping to protect the company’s interests, ultimately “bottom line” profit. Customer demands and expectations, however, tend to be changeable and manufacturing companies have to be flexible so that they can respond to these changes and continuously satisfy customer demands. Therefore a quality assurance system, as a sub‐system of the manufacturing system, must also be designed to cope with these issues of change. A knowledge‐based decision system having appropriate decision criteria and rules to recommend modules of a quality assurance system appropriate to specific company profiles will therefore be a valuable tool for executives and managers of manufacturing businesses. This paper summarises the results of a study conducted on more than 500 UK companies. The main results are in the form of an algorithm that can be used in the formulation of the knowledge‐based decision system.