Quality Assurance at Fermilab
Message from the Director
Here is a new acronym to learn: IQA, for Integrated Quality Assurance. It parallels the name Integrated Safety Management, the systematic approach we use in managing safety. Now we want to take the same approach to QA: to integrate it into the way that we carry out our work, systematically building it from the beginning into all our activities. Like ISM, IQA is a line management responsibility at all levels of the organization. Of course, we already know we do great, high quality work. So why do we need a new approach?
Many examples illustrate where a systematic approach to QA activities could have helped us deliver a better product or avoid problems. We do not have to look far to find spectacular examples of problems that arose from failures of QA in design or fabrication. Think of our own LHC triplets or CERN’s faulty bus-bar splice that will cause nine months’ delay in the turn-on of the machine. Furthermore, a systematic approach to QA is a foundation of trying to continuously improve our processes.
A DOE audit two years ago highlighted problems with our approach to QA. We do a lot of QA activities. We could not run the Tevatron or publish outstanding physics results without some form of QA. But we do not do QA under a systematic framework across the laboratory, and we do not properly document what we do. Reviews and audits do not recognize or give us credit for what we do. To improve this situation, we have worked with our industrial partners EG&G to produce a plan that received a favorable response from DOE. The implementation of this plan will start with an investigation of the way laboratory staff currently perform quality assurance activities. In this “As-Is review,” we will document the baseline quality controls that we already have in place, identify areas in need of additional quality controls, create corrective action plans and then implement the necessary changes as appropriate for each area.
These activities should place us in a good position for the audit of our program that the DOE will carry out next September. To help with the implementation of our plan, each division has appointed Quality Assurance Representatives (QARs), and we have in addition three new Quality Assurance Engineers (QAEs) from EG&G. So please – I urge you to work with the QARs and the QAEs to implement the IQA ASAP.