Robert Duchamp

Total quality management: the cement for a collaboration between an engineering school and the French army

The object of this paper is to present a model for the management of quality implemented in an original situation, a collaboration between an engineering school, the French army, nationalized and private industry, and several doctors. The goal of this project is the design and fabrication of a new NBC (nuclear, biological and chemical) protection mask for the military. This project will be presented as a complex system within which the authors have defined seven interactive areas: project steering system, the customer–supplier network, the objectives, the product architecture, the functionality of the product and of its sub-assemblies, the costs, the time periods. The definition of these areas and their interactions was made within the framework of a quality approach which aims to guarantee costs, times and the performance of the product while leaving scope for creativity and functional or technological innovations. In conclusion, the quality approach is here presented as facilitating, beyond the use of s...