Success of any business lies typically in enhancing the shareholder’s value by delivering the quality and reliable products and services, all the time and by ensuring customer satisfaction. This piece of information, all of you must have gone through or read or even told, number of times. There are 2 key aspects, which are significant to delve upon further – One customer satisfaction and other being quality of products/ services.
Customer Satisfaction
The customer satisfaction comes by the way of delighting the customers through various steps like identifying their needs and expectations, acting on the feedbacks in true spirit, working on the decisions to develop long–term association with customers. The business that create value in the eyes of the customer is more likely to sustain. The customers perceive such businesses really valuable, those truly understand their needs and are committed to meeting those needs. Then customer is ready to pay even premium for their quality & reliable products with respect to its competition
Quality of Products / services
We need to define first what is quality. There are number of definitions on quality, developed by well-known scientists/ researchers. Few of them are –
- Quality is meeting a product or service’s requirements and standards.
- Quality is defined as having no flaws or fully fulfilling the requirements.
- Quality means the fitness for purpose of use based on product’s functions.
- Quality depends on how much a product’s characteristics vary.
Having defined –what quality means, we can discuss then – how quality gets developed or built upon during cycle of product realisation. Quality is actually attained or built through collaborative efforts of participating teams from various functions within organisation. So overall product quality can be guaranteed only by persistently ensuring quality at every stage in the journey of its realisation. To assure quality, the design specification should conform to the requirements/needs of customer and the manufacturing of (whether outsourced or in-house) components should conform to such design requirements. Further, the manufacturing processes and technologies should support to meet the design specification requirements.
While this will definitely help to produce items with inbuilt quality in few occasions, however in order to produce such high-quality products repeatedly, we need to establish strong quality management systems through Quality Assurance process.
What is Quality Assurance
Quality Assurance (QA) is the process that ensures the products/services meet or even exceed the customer requirements consistently and are free from defects before they are dispatched to the customers. So, for businesses to produce high-quality products reliably, quality assurance is fundamental or primary for their long-term success.
How to ensure QA
Few steps are suggested as under to get high quality products on consistent basis-
- Implementing robust Quality Management Systems such as ISO9001
- Strict compliance to the statutory, regulatory and contractual requirements;
- Ensuring / maintaining regular (or laid down) processes and systems through regular audits
- Defining correctly quality assurance plans & quality control plans with inputs from design specifications
- Conducting regular customer feedback & satisfaction survey
- Adopting best quality practices like total quality management (TQM), poka-yoke, kaizen, 5S, 6 sigma & lean programs, 7 QC tools, 8D process techniques,
- Defining key performance indicators (KPI) across business functions
- Regular calibrations of gauges, tools & instruments
- Ensuring first time right & every time right
- Training and skill development of manpower to ensure that right skilled personnel are deployed
- Use of standard process sheets, formats, checklists
- Creating environment and culture of continuous improvements, benchmarking processes, recognition & appreciation of employees & stakeholders.
Some of other important international standards which are followed by the companies are ISO 14001 for environmental management, ISO 27001 for information security management, ISO 45001 for occupational health & safety management, ISO 17025 for NABL accreditation of in-house labs, NADCAP for special processes, CMMI for maturity & capability demonstration, to name few.
Why QA?
Implementing QA is crucial to the businesses. Here are few benefits:
- Improved customer satisfaction
- Assured quality & timely delivery
- Streamlined / uniform process
- Enhanced creditability for company
- Reduced wastages & Increased efficiency– lower Cost of Poor Quality (CoPQ)
- Reduced risks of product recalls/ customer complaints
- Faster clearances of products due to reduced inspections
- Building a strong, trusted and mutually beneficial relationship with all stakeholders
- Inculcating behaviour-based quality (BBQ) culture through teamwork, collaborative approach, professionalism and recognition
- Establishing leadership in quality through innovation, digitalization, automation and benchmark with global leaders
- Creating strong brand & reputation in the market
Steps in QA process
The QA process includes following steps:
- Quality Planning – Identifying & capturing customer requirements in the form Quality Assurance Plans (QAP) and Quality control (QCP) / Inspection plans (IP) indicating measurement gauges / tools, formats, standards to follow, inspection stages – witness, review or hold points.
- Design and Engineering – preparing design specifications indicating dimensions along with tolerance, Critical to Quality (CTQ) parameters, testing requirements & procedures, process parameters to be met, documentation requirement
- Product Qualification: System level, sub-system & component level qualification criteria and acceptance norms, Compliance to Environmental specifications (ESS tests), EMI/EMC test, shock/vibration test, Tests mandated as per JSS/MIL or other reputed standards.
- Quality Control- Performing physical, chemical, and few other tests on the product, carrying out inspections – in-process & final stages including Factory acceptance tests (FAT), trials, testing, documentation review etc.
- Support to Customer – Warranty & AMC support, user trials during / post installation & commissioning, Defect investigations (as per Customer feedback), systems upgrade/ modifications (based on Customer need / or as per obsolescence management plans)
- Feedback/ Surveys – Seeking customer feedback and suggestions, attending to the complaints observed during its exploitations.
Conclusion
With QA in focus, it is possible to build resilient quality culture where team members care about the quality of their work, and make decisions based on achieving expected level of quality, thus making the products those are safe, reliable and effective. Due to reduced customer complaints, Employees within the organisation feel highly motivated, energetic and further committed to work for such organisations.
Thus, quality assurance is highly important and fundamental for the success of any business, providing several benefits those include improved customer satisfaction, reduced wastages, improved organisation efficiency, thus improving profitability and becoming more competitive.
References:
1. https://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs/38091/InTech-The_integration_of_tqm_and_six_sigma.pdf
2. https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/38091
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