Towards CIS in Quality Management - Integration of Agents and Methods

In order to enable cooperation between information systems, three levels of cooperation have to be considered, viz. the technical, method, and agent level. We have examined the current state of integration in the field of quality management, coming to the conclusion that integration on the method and agent levels have been neglected so far. Therefore, we have developed a concept for ensuring the cooperation of information systems on these two levels, which we present in this paper. We have chosen two methods from quality management, namely Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.