In the manufacturing world, quality assurance (QA) procedures exist to improve the overall quality of products made and ensure that customers get the experience they want. However, these are easy procedures to neglect – and many businesses don’t give them proper attention or refinement.
The Importance of QA
Why is QA so important for manufacturing businesses?
• Consistency. First, QA is arguably necessary for consistency. Consistency is good for your business for many reasons, promoting customer loyalty, increasing trust, and overall reducing errors and headaches in your business. If you have a reliable QA system in place, you’ll never have to worry that two products leave your line in different conditions or with different quality standards.
• Product quality. Obviously, QA is also a way to boost your product quality. The better your products are, and the more reliable they are, the more business you’ll naturally attract.
• Time/money savings. Better QA can also lead to time and monetary savings, above and beyond whatever you spend on QA itself. You won’t have to deal with as many returns, chargebacks, contract issues, or even product liability issues if you catch most mistakes before any customer sees them.
How to Perfect Your Quality Assurance (QA) Procedures
So how do you perfect your quality assurance procedures?
• Define specific processes/protocols. Specific processes and protocols, like Factory Acceptance Testing (FAT), can concretely define the steps your team members need to take to ensure that products meet your quality standards. The first step in developing or improving any QA system is to make sure you have the right processes and protocols in place. What rounds of testing are you going to apply to your products? What types of tests are you going to use, and how are they going to measure or evaluate your products?
• Define clear metrics and standards. In line with this, it’s important to define clear metrics and standards that you want to meet. For example, if your product is defined to meet certain measurement requirements, how much of a tolerance do you have for slight deviations? The more objective and specific you can get here, the better. Without clear metrics and baselines, your QA personnel won’t know how to evaluate the products coming off the line.
• Automate what you can. Automation is hugely beneficial in any QA process, and for two distinct reasons. First, it saves time, and therefore money. If you can automate something that would ordinarily take manual effort, you’ll reduce the number of hours required to execute the task. This speeds things up tremendously while simultaneously reducing costs. Second, it improves consistency. Human QA staff members, as diligent as they may be, are capable of making mistakes, but algorithms and machines are generally not. They will behave exactly as programmed.
• Test, test, test. Testing is the heart of QA, so it’s important to deploy multiple different tests to evaluate your products in different respects. The exact tests you use, as well as the number of tests you use, are going to depend on the types of products you’re making and the industry standards to which you want to adhere.
• Document everything. In any QA process, you should make a concentrated effort to document everything you can. Make note of which tests were performed and when. Keep track of your batches and product numbers. Have authorities sign off on various QA processes so you can hold them accountable if something was neglected or missed. This is a way of ensuring compliance and doubles as a convenient archive of information you can use for root cause analyses in the future.
• Introduce checks and balances. QA processes are made stronger with better checks and balances. In other words, it’s important for there to be multiple responsible parties to hold each other accountable. If one branch or segment of your QA department fails, another branch or segment, or a supervisor should be able to catch the mistake before it’s too late.
• Review and improve. If something improperly passes a QA check, it should be a prompt for you to review and improve your systems. Why did this failure happen? What can you do to prevent this type of failure in the future? Regular review sessions are critical for ongoing improvement.
• Implement continuous feedback. Continuous feedback is a system in which feedback is constantly collected, reviewed, and incorporated. If you implement this type of continuous feedback system in your QA department, you should have a steady stream of new recommendations and suggestions from your workers, which you can use to improve both consistency and efficiency in QA.
Your QA department is one of the most important departments in your manufacturing business, but it’s not going to bring you much value unless you’re willing to properly develop and improve it.
With these strategies and a commitment to consistent quality, you should be in a much better position to deliver the excellent products your customers expect.
