Controlling quality management involves a structured approach to ensure products or services consistently meet defined standards.
Effectively controlling quality management follows a systematic process that integrates setting clear standards, implementing robust processes, monitoring performance, and continuously improving based on feedback.
Based on established practices and information from various sources, including the provided reference, the core steps for quality control are:
- Set Your Quality Standards: Begin by defining what quality means for your specific product, service, or process. This involves identifying and prioritizing the standards that are most critical.
- Examples of standards: Defect rate targets, customer satisfaction scores, performance metrics, compliance requirements.
- Prioritize based on impact on customer satisfaction, safety, or operational efficiency.
- Establish and Implement Operational Processes: Develop and put into action the procedures and workflows necessary to consistently deliver optimal quality. This involves documenting steps, assigning responsibilities, and training personnel.
- Documenting processes (e.g., standard operating procedures - SOPs).
- Implementing checks and balances within workflows.
- Ensuring resources (equipment, materials, skilled labor) are available and used correctly.
- Review Your Results and Identify Gaps: Regularly measure the actual performance against the set quality standards. Analyze the data to find discrepancies or areas where quality is not meeting expectations.
- Collecting data through inspections, tests, audits, or performance metrics.
- Analyzing trends and identifying root causes of quality issues.
- Comparing actual results to predefined targets.
- Get Feedback and Make Improvisations: Solicit input from customers, employees, and other stakeholders. Use this feedback, along with the results of your reviews, to make necessary improvements to standards, processes, or implementation methods.
- Gathering customer feedback through surveys, reviews, or direct communication.
- Collecting internal feedback from production teams or service providers.
- Implementing corrective and preventive actions (CAPA) based on identified gaps and feedback.
- Continuously refining standards and processes for ongoing improvement.
This iterative process ensures that quality is not just a one-time check but an ongoing cycle of planning, doing, checking, and acting (PDCA).
Summary of Quality Control Steps
| Step | Description | Key Activities |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Set Standards | Define what constitutes quality and prioritize key metrics. | Identify requirements, define metrics, prioritize. |
| 2. Establish & Implement | Create and apply the processes needed to achieve quality. | Document procedures, train staff, deploy resources. |
| 3. Review Results & Identify | Measure performance against standards and find areas needing improvement. | Collect data, analyze performance, identify deviations. |
| 4. Get Feedback & Improvise | Use input and analysis to refine standards and processes. | Gather feedback, perform root cause analysis, implement improvements. |
By diligently following these steps, organizations can maintain effective control over their quality management system, leading to improved customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.
