Quality politics: an immaterial investment for companies in (micro)electronics

Abstract

With the globalization of the markets and the growth of competitiveness in the manufacturing sector, quality has become a key factor of success. Quality is particularly important for the companies which activate in the micro(electronics) field. The quality management system holds a vital place in the company's structure. Implementing such a system requires important operating costs. These costs are known as Quality Obtaining Costs (QOC) and may be considered as an investment. Planning an investment, means evaluating its return in order to see if it is profitable or not. Measuring the return of quality politics investment raise some delicate problems. We may calculate some aspects of the return of investment by measuring the shape of non-quality costs. An eventual decrease of these costs could be synonym with a profitable investment. But the advantages of good quality politics cannot be measured only by taking into consideration the non-quality costs (even if they include direct and indirect costs). There are also intangible advantages (like mark image, competences, polyvalence, client's satisfaction…) that derive from quality approaches. How to evaluate this type of consequences / advantages? The idea developed in this article is to considerate the quality politics like un immaterial/intelligent investment. Therefore could it be advantageous / possible to use the immaterial investment's measuring and evaluation techniques for studying the quality politics return of investment?Quality, quality management, quality cost, quality politics, QOC, microelectronics

Ensuring the Security of a Communication Network through Resilience. Mathematical Modeling

“…Thus, such systems have an intrinsically high dependability. The term dependability is a complex notion that includes the following topics: reliability, availability, confidentiality, safety and security [3]. One of the most widely used techniques for increasing the dependability of systems is the implementation of the fault-tolerance [4], [5] a technique to be considered in this paper.…”