Quality Control What is Quality Control Quality control

Quality Control

What is Quality Control? Quality control is a process that is used to ensure a certain level of quality in a product or service. It might include whatever actions a business deems necessary to provide for the control and verification of certain characteristics of a product or service. Most often, it involves thoroughly examining and testing the quality of products or the results of services. The basic goal of this process is to ensure that the products or services that are provided meet specific requirements and characteristics, such as being dependable, satisfactory, safe and fiscally sound.

Basic examples of Quality Control: Manufacturers of food products often have employees who test the finished products for taste and other qualities. Clothing manufacturers have workers inspect garments to ensure that they are properly sewn. Service-oriented companies often have representatives who observe the services being performed or who do follow-up checks to ensure that everything was done properly.

When does Quality Control occur? 1. When raw materials are received prior to entering production. 2. Whilst products are going through the production process. 3. When products are finished - inspection or testing takes place before products are despatched to customers. 4. Evaluating people. (Applicable with service-oriented companies. )

7 Basic Tools of Quality 1. Check sheet - It is a form used to collect data in real time at the location where the data are generated. The data it captures can be quantitative or qualitative. When the information is quantitative, the check sheet is sometimes called a tally sheet. 2. Control chart - It is also known as Shewhart charts or process behavior charts, in statistical process control are tools used to determine if a manufacturing or business process is in a state of statistical control. 3. Histogram - It is a graphical representation showing a visual impression of the distribution of data.

7 Basic Tools of Quality 4. Ishikawa Diagram - Common uses of the Ishikawa diagram are product design and quality defect prevention, to identify potential factors causing an overall effect. Each cause or reason for imperfection is a source of variation. Causes are usually grouped into major categories to identify these sources of variation. 5. Pareto Chart - It is a type of chart that contains both bars and a line graph, where individual values are represented in descending order by bars, and the cumulative total is represented by the line.

7 Basic Tools of Quality 6. Scatter diagram - It is a type of mathematical diagram using Cartesian coordinates to display values for two variables for a set of data. 7. Flow chart - It is a type of diagram that represents an algorithm or process, showing the steps as boxes of various kinds, and their order by connecting them with arrows.

Some problems concerning Quality Control: The inspection process does not add any "value". If there were any guarantees that no defective output would be produced, then there would be no need for an inspection process in the first place. Inspection is costly, in terms of both tangible and intangible costs. For example, materials, labour, time, employee morale, customer goodwill, lost sales. It is sometimes done too late in the production process. This often results in defective or non-acceptable goods actually being received by the customer.

Some problems concerning Quality Control: It is usually done by the wrong people - e. g. by a separate "quality control inspection team" rather than by the workers themselves. Inspection is often not compatible with more modern production techniques (e. g. "Just in Time Manufacturing") which do not allow time for much (if any) inspection. There is often disagreement as to what constitutes a "quality product". For example, to meet quotas, inspectors may approve goods that don't meet 100% conformance, giving the message to workers that it doesn't matter if their work is a bit sloppy. Or one quality control inspector may follow different procedures from another, or use different measurements.

Difference between Quality Control & Quality Assurance Though the two are similar, but there are some basic differences. Quality control is concerned with examining the product or service — the end result ‐ and quality assurance is concerned with examining the process that leads to the end result. A company would use quality assurance to ensure that a product is manufactured in the right way, thereby reducing or eliminating potential problems with the quality of the final product.

"Inspection with the aim of finding the bad ones and throwing them out is too late, ineffective, costly. Quality comes not from inspection but from improvement of the process. " - W. Edwards Deming