Quality control ensures goods and services meet customer standards. Total Quality Management and statistical process control can improve quality. Each department has standards to meet, and automated quality control tools can help identify potential issues.
Quality control is the systematic process of ensuring that all goods and services offered by a business meet or exceed standards identified as necessary to attract, satisfy and retain customers. This ongoing process of evaluating and improving quality helps companies stay competitive over the long term, as well as ensuring that the company has a reputation for providing customers with high quality goods and services. As with many processes, there are ways to continually improve the level of quality control in virtually every situation.
One of the most effective ways to measure and improve quality control is to implement a process known as Total Quality Management, or TQM. Essentially, this approach involves looking at all aspects of the operation, starting with the procurement of raw materials to the delivery of finished products to a customer. Although this approach to quality control is intense, it is often possible to identify small problems that can turn into big problems and threaten the quality of the goods and services offered.
As part of TQM, a strategy known as statistical process control is often employed. This strategy seeks not only to determine which materials are used in the manufacturing process, but also how those materials are manipulated at each junction along the way to creating a final product. This approach to quality management seeks to understand what factors may be causing a small amount of waste in terms of materials or time. By understanding what is currently occurring, it is possible to develop alternative procedures that would eliminate this waste of time or materials, thus allowing production of more products without compromising the quality of the finished products.
Since measuring quality standards is an ongoing process, there is always a chance to change quality management methods from time to time. For example, if new equipment is ordered that can more efficiently handle tasks previously handled by machines in two different departments, effective quality control might mandate that these two departments be merged into one entity. At the same time, increased production can mean that tasks easily done in a single department may need to be segregated and become the function of two different departments.
In most cases, measuring quality standards is not the sole responsibility of a quality assurance department or division. Rather, each department involved in the process of creating goods and services has certain standards that they must meet. By breaking down the logical progression of materials in the manufacturing process, it’s much easier to identify a flaw in a given department’s function and correct the problem before there’s a chance that flaw creates more problems later in the process. Setting and monitoring department-level standards is as important to quality control as overseeing the overall manufacturing process.
Computer technology has made it possible to use automated quality control tools to great effect. Tools of this type are constantly gathering and organizing data into formats that QA and QA personnel can evaluate. Using this type of automated software can make it possible to identify potential quality issues before they have a chance to impact the customer, allowing the company to maintain its good name and customer base.
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