As a management or business owner in a company, there will be more than a thousand things to control in your operations process. Ensure sales continuously come in and products or services are delivered smoothly and timely with excellent quality.
Bad quality is a critical impact on a company’s profit margin. And bad ratings may cause a loss of sales.
It’s a challenge for a boss to simultaneously take care of sales and quality. Delegation is a way. Many companies already did this. Let your staff make quality control decisions.
Yeah, you know! But how to do a quality check?
Setting up your quality control involves several steps. Let’s see how you can do it!
1. Quality Control Plan
Prepare Your FIRST Quality Control Plan
You may do it yourself or assign staff to prepare for you.
Don’t expect 100% perfection in your first version of the quality control plan. Prepare your quality control plan based on your current business operations stage.
Start implementing and improving it along the way.
A quality control plan is a ‘LIVE‘ document. You can update and keep enhancing it with a better quality check method, adding new customer requirements, change sample size and do anything to improve your product quality control anytime.
A quality control plan contains all the quality judgement guidelines and assignment of responsibility, authorized workers/staff to do the daily quality control.
It’s a great communication tool in a company. Everyone knows who does what, what to do, how to do and how to respond if they find “out of specification” products.
Learn how to prepare Quality Control Plan – For Beginners and Implementers.
2. “Vital Few” Decision Making
Once management/ business owners have implemented the quality control plan.
Employees will follow the quality control specification and guidelines to accept or reject the product. It will standardize your quality control process to provide your customer with a consistent product.
Next, the management team or business owner will spend less time deciding on daily quality control.
You only get involved invital few decision making on product quality.
Such as,
(a) MRB, Material Review Board
- Group of leaders/heads of department to decide whether to release or not release the detected nonconformance product.
- Usually, this happens when the nonconformance defect is at the borderline or the quantity of affected product is huge.
(b) Quality Report
- Data collected during quality control will be analysed. Present in a graph or chart as information for decision-making. It helps to identify major trends.
- Based on the quality report, management/ business owner will decide it’s either an opportunity for improvement or a risk to the business market share. Prioritize your resource allocation to the most critical quality issues.
3. Corrective Action
What will you do when your products' quality is not ok?
You will produce more nonconformance products if you continue to run the machine or process “as is” due to tight schedules.
The internal quality cost $$ will be higher.
- Scrap (The whole batch is out of specification, wrong specification, function failure, safety issues)
- Sort (Partially are out of specification, e.g. colour, dimension, fitting, appearance defects, etc.)
- Rework (Defects can be remedied, e.g. colour touch-up, reassembling the missing part, polishing the appearance surface, remixing the viscosity, etc.)
- Return to the supplier (for raw materials or parts from the supplier)
- Sell as a discount (minor appearance defects with no functional failure)
Improper segregation and management of nonconformance products may cause defective products to be released to a customer.
Customer complaints will cost more $$$ than internal quality costs.
QC 7 tools will help you brainstorm your root causes, establish an essential data collection and analysis to solve your quality issues.
The market keeps changing, and new issues keep coming in. A corrective action process will help solve problems systematically and effectively. Stop repeated problems and solve a new problem at the same time.
Final Thought
Most organizations that choose to be quality leaders in their industries have become more competitive in the market. They provide a better choice for consumers in buying decisions. And more sustainable in business with satisfied customers.
You may first apply a quality control plan to check your product quality to kick start your quality control in your company.
Then, establish written procedures. Provide one reference source of formal and approved standard operations flow to all employees. It helps to reduce most of the miss communication or miss understanding caused by scattered information.
To have a complete quality management system, consider adopting ISO 9001 standards. ISO 9001 certification with the external audit will help to monitor that your control system is being followed. Plus, as marketing benefits.
Feel free to share your thoughts or ask questions in the comment below. We are happy to help in your QAQC journey.
