In many occasions the market demands or even legal requirements make it necessary to carry out a variable control to not only know if there is a color or a notch in a piece, but to determine the exact color pantone or the exact dimensions of that piece.
Therefore, when selecting the type of control used, it will depend on the product you are manufacturing, the requirements of the market you are targeting, your internal requirements as an organization and possible legal requirements to manufacture that product. The use of the product reviews is maximum here.
How to establish quality control in your company
The following sections of this article have been used to specify the steps to follow to carry out a quality control of your product or service.
Quality control of a product
Define the batch and sample
This is the initial part before starting to make the appropriate inspections. You must define what you are going to inspect. Of all your daily production, what batch are you going to inspect. And within the batch, which sample will you select as a number of representative units that allow you to extrapolate the results for the entire production.
Define the standard
Define for that product which attributes and variables you are going to measure that determines that its manufacture is within the quality standard that you have determined.
Collect the sample units
Collect the units that you are going to inspect and analyze whether or not they meet the standards in relation to the attributes and variables that you have previously defined.
You can carry out this collection of units:
During production: at some point, throughout the various steps of production.
After production: at the end of production.
Make quality control
This is the time when you inspect each collected unit to accept or reject it according to the quality standards established based on the attributes and variables.
Only two things can happen in this inspection:
- That the selected unit has no defects.
- That the selected unit does have defects.
For the units that you have found faulty decide if:
Reprocess it: in case the defects can be corrected and it can be converted into a unit with the required quality.
Discard it: in case the defects cannot be corrected and therefore the unit will not meet the required quality standards.
Sometimes and depending on the number of units discarded, you can make the decision to discard the entire batch produced since the risk of there being more defective units that were left out of the sample is high.
Analyze discarded units
Find out if there is a common cause for discarded units that cause quality degradation and therefore non-compliance with the established standard.
You could also analyze the reprocessed units but we would focus only on the discarded units since they are the ones that represent the highest cost of “non-quality” for said units.
Make a decision
Determine if you should modify something in the production process: equipment adjustments, personnel training, modification of the raw material used. The mental map of these steps could look something like this:
- Scheme steps quality control of a product.
Quality control of a service
A service has the characteristic that it is something intangible, but as everything or almost everything can be measured, I am going to explain the steps that I would follow to carry out quality control in a service:
