Hey guys, can someone explain the difference between quality control/assurance/improvement? Is it just the stages at which product quality is assessed?
Here are my notes for this dot point of the syllabus
Let me know if you have any other questions!!
QUALITY MANAGEMENT Quality management refers to those processes that a business undertakes to ensure:
- Consistency
- Reliability
- Safety
- Fitness of purpose of product
Quality Control – (inspection, measurement and intervention)
Quality control reduces problems and defects in the product by using inspections at various points in the production process.
- Pre-determined quality targets would be set and any failure to meet the targets would need to be assessed and appropriate action taken to correct any issue that has caused quality standards to fall below expectation.
- Quality control management may require that labour be appropriately trained to apply quality standards throughout working processes.
Quality Assurance – International Quality Standards
Quality assurance involves the use of a system to ensure that set standards are achieved in production. This is done through taking a series of measurements and assessing them against preI determined quality standards.
Aspects of quality that are important to QA include:
- The notion of ‘fitness for purpose’ or how well a product does what it is designed to do
- The desire to achieve ‘right first time’ so that products do not need to be reworked, which
wastes time, energy and other resources
A widely used international standard is the International Organisation for Standardisation 9000 (ISO 9000).
Given that the production of components for a manufactured good such as a TV may come from different suppliers from different countries, such standards are an important quality control mechanism for ‘global’ companies. This ensures that the quality of the components from one nation is also equal to the components of another supplier in another nation.
Quality ImprovementQuality improvement focuses on two aspects: continuous improvement and total quality management. Continuous Improvement: is an ongoing commitment to improving a business’s goods or services. That is, all staff is encouraged to demonstrate initiative and to suggest areas where improvements can be made in improving the quality of the products being produced.
Total Quality Management: this concept focuses on managing the total business to deliver quality to customers. It is an ongoing, business-wide commitment to excellence that is applied to every aspect of the business’s operation. To achieve TQM objectives requires four elements: benchmarking, employee empowerment, a focus on the customer and continuous improvement.
Benchmarking: evaluate (something) by comparison with a standard