Quality control: best practices to ensure excellence in product and service

Posted on Oct 09, 2023 at 12:10 AM

Quality Control (QC) is necessary for any company that provides services or manufactures products because of its essential role in controlling operations, improving customer satisfaction, reducing waste, raising efficiency, and increasing profits for companies by providing products and services with high-quality specifications.

More insight into this concept helps better understand the importance of quality control for companies and industries; the following article provides enough information on the idea of quality control, how it is, and the best practices applied to achieve adequate control.

What does Quality Control mean?

Quality is not limited to a single definition, but the generally accepted definition is a strict control and testing process for products and services manufactured. 

Provided by companies to ensure that they conform to all recognised global basic standards. 

Through quality control, companies can assess, maintain and improve the effectiveness of their products' quality.

Control varies according to the industry it monitors. The type of process or end product has a role in determining the activities and procedures that should be applied in the control process, for example, in pharmaceutical and food factories. 

Special tests on production lines involve examining chemicals and bacteria in the laboratory to ensure that there are no possible contaminants.

In the long run, investing in quality control processes protects the company's reputation and prevents the emergence of undesirable or unreliable products. This is also reflected in increasing consumer confidence in the brand and the company.

• Another critical aspect of QC is that it is a routine process that only happens once and for all. 
• A repeated product evaluation ensures it conforms to manufacturing standards and consumer demand.
• Quality control is essential because it ensures that companies rely on evidence-based data and research rather than adopting only anecdotal observations. 
• Thereby ensuring that all their products meet their established standards.
• Quality control and assurance often need clarification; the concepts are very different. 
• Quality assurance refers to all comprehensive procedures and quality processes to prevent defects from arising and meet all quality requirements. 
• Control refers to ensuring that manufactured elements conform to standards and standards and using measurement and analysis processes to confirm this.

Why is quality control important?

The reasons why quality control is a vital need include:

• Promoting awareness of the concept of quality: Quality control drives workers to consider quality throughout manufacturing. This helps companies achieve the required levels of quality in each process.

• Lower production costs: Quality control places on checking the production of manufactured items and correcting any item that does not meet quality standards.

• Thereby reducing production costs.

• Increased customer satisfaction: Effective quality control ensures the customer gets a product free of errors and defects. Reflected in customer satisfaction.

• Improved Reputation: The manufacture of high-quality products that meet all the basic requirements of quality control in the company means producing products that meet customers' needs, improving the company's reputation in general.

• Raising employee morale: Producing high-quality consumer-value products reflects company morale in general and employee morale in particular when they know about it.

• Improve production methods: The quality control process simplifies and improves production processes; this means the development and improvement of methods and methods used and higher productivity.

• Increase sales: The excellent reputation of the company's quality attracts more new customers and increases sales.

• Ensuring effective use of resources: Quality control helps companies use resources and materials by reducing waste of materials and waste products and increasing efficiency.

How is quality control done in companies?

An effective quality control process consists of some typical steps needed:

• Development of evaluation criteria:

Starting with implementing any quality control program, the standards and specifications the company has to achieve in its products and meet in front of its customers. For example, the task force must determine the number of samples they must take and test.

• Testing raw materials and different stages:

Effective quality control requires testing all the manufacturing process steps; for example, it starts with trying the control staff for the specifications of the raw materials to use in production.

Thus, the tests at all different stages of manufacturing continue phase by step to determine the location at which problems occur.

• Correction of problems:

After detecting the stage at which problems occur, the team must find the right solutions to avoid making the same mistakes again in the future.

• Data collection and decision-making:

After completion, the team must collect the data, create their reports, submit them to the decision-makers for consideration, review the processes, and determine further actions. 

Where there are defective products that management may decide to repair or dispose of, although there are many faulty products. 

The company must develop its plan to improve the manufacturing process or change the source of raw materials.

What are the best quality control practices in the business?

The following list includes a range of the most important methods and methods of quality control in the business:

• Inspection and testing:

The inspection method is by taking random samples of products and conducting some tests on them according to one or more criteria to ensure that they conform to the specifications set by the company, not by tracking them on the company's quality control schemes.

This blueprint shows whether the products and processes sampled meet or do not meet company quality standards, and how they differ from the company's requirements; following quality training courses in London helps to clarify more information on the quality application and control differences in chart models.

These schemes can analyse specific product characteristics or measure differences in many traits of a single product. A scheme that measures differences in many attributes of a single product is a multi-variable scheme. 

While a scheme that measures a particular characteristic is only called a single variable scheme.

By analysing the results of the pattern that appeared on the scheme, the company can find out whether product defects occur regularly or are random defects.

Most companies use X-bar charts to track the quality of their products, but another set of diagrams is also used to track performance, such as a cause-and-effect chart, control scheme, and flow chart.

• Taguchi Method:

The Taguchi method lies in the principle that R&D in product design significantly reduces the likelihood of errors or defects in finished products.

It was the Japanese statistician and engineer Genichi Taguchi who developed this method based on his belief that design is the most crucial element in the manufacturing process to end differences between products, i.e. the way says that improving the initial design prevents production discrepancies.

• Statistical sampling:

This method involves taking a sample of all products for the test team to test according to the company's effective quality management system. 

The sample size can vary from one product to another, after which the team concludes the status of the rest of the products depending on the results shown on the samples taken and adjusts the manufacturing processes if required.

Concluding, 

Ensuring that products are as similar as possible and reducing errors and inconsistencies during manufacturing processes is what companies strive to achieve as much as possible through the development of their quality control systems.