Visual inspection is regarded as one of the critical activities for quality control in a manufacturing company. it is thus important to improve the performance of detecting a defective part or product. There are three probable working modes for visual inspection: fully automatic (by automatic machines), fully manual (by human operators), and semi-automatic (by collaboration between human operators and automatic machines). Most of the current studies on visual inspection have been focused on the improvement of automatic detection performance by developing a better automatic machine using computer vision technologies. However, there are still a range of situations where human operators should conduct visual inspection with/without automatic machines. In this situation, human operators’performance of visual inspection is significant to the successful quality control. However, visual inspection of components assembled into a mobile camera module belongs to those situations. This study aims to investigate human performance issues in visual inspection of the components, paying more attention to human errors. For this, Abstraction Hierarchy-based work domain modeling method was applied to examine a range of direct or indirect factors related to human errors and their relationships in the visual inspection of the components. Although this study was conducted in the context of manufacturing mobile camera modules, the proposed method would be easily generalized into other industries.

A prerequisite for improving the quality of a product is to enhance the quality of its parts supplied from outsourced enterprises. An enterprise certified by ISO 9001 Quality Management System is expected to develop their effective quality assurance system and maintain it through continuous control and improvement, thereby ensuring the good quality of products that they produce. However, it is reported that small and medium–sized enterprises certified by ISO 9001 have difficulty establishing an effective quality assurance system. This study aims to propose a new method of improving a quality assurance system that can be more effective in small and medium–sized enterprises. This study collectively considered requirements specified in several international standards on quality system and the results of expert group brainstorming to identify evaluation areas and items for assessing a quality assurance system. Based on these evaluation areas and items, a set of checklists for diagnosing and improving a quality assurance system was developed. In order to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed method, this study applied it to ten small and medium-sized enterprises and could identify four approaches for improving their current quality assurance system. The presented improvement method, which consists of establishment of quality goals and quality innovation plan, defective products corrective activities, 4M and design change process, improvement of customer quality information management, is expected to be utilized as a useful tool for the enhancement of the quality assurance system of small and medium-sized enterprises.