How to ensure quality control

When you are producing products or outsourcing your products to another company, you need to make sure there is a high level of quality control. Quality control simply means you will set a standard for where your products need to be at and then strive hard to meet those expectations. When quality control is not implemented within a plant, it can lead to manufacturing defects and other problems. Product recalls are incredibly expensive for your business and could damage your company's reputation for life. Quality control helps you avoid expensive lawsuits and other things by taking steps to prevent problems and eliminate them before they become a burden and a waste on your company.

If you are choosing to work with a company that will manufacture your products, you need to also find out how they implement quality control. This is extremely important if you are working with manufacturing companies that are overseas. They have different safety standards in other countries so you will need to check up on the manufacturing plant before you hire them.

Find out how much experience the company has with their overseas exporting. Check references to see if their previous clients have been happy with their services and delivery of the products. Exporting products is expensive, are they planning to work the shipping costs into the total production costs or are they going to send you a separate bill for the manufacturing and shipping costs.

When you are dealing with overseas plants, you need to make sure you keep the lines of communication open. It can be a bit of a challenge as the representatives with the company may not be fluent in English and they may not understand all of the demands you are asking for. Foreign language barriers can cause a number of issues for you with your product production.

Have they implementing safety standards? What are they doing to make sure their employees are staying safe? A great method to implement is known as Behavioral based safety. Ask the manufacturing plant to consider implementing it so you can find out that the people that are producing your products are staying safe.

Outsourcing to manufacturing plants can be hard since you lose some of the control. Obtain quotes from multiple companies and obtain quotes. You also need to meet with them to find out what type of control you will have and what your involvement will be with the company. Be careful of the price when you obtain the quote from the different manufacturing plants. Some of them may offer a low price but you will get what you pay for and they may not have a high standard for quality control.

Quality control not only starts with the machinery and equipment you have and making sure everything woks correctly, it also comes down to your employees. You need to make sure your employees are properly trained on their job responsibilities. Improper training can lead to mistakes within the manufacturing process and this will cause you to have expensive product recalls. Have your manufacturing equipment tested often to make sure everything is running correctly and to prevent problems from happening.

Always inspect the products carefully and test them for quality. This is the best way to make sure the manufacturing equipment isn't producing product defects. If you are outsourcing the manufacturing of your products, you always need to check the finished goods for quality. If you notice a problem, report it in a timely manner so you can return it and have it replaced. Most plants will build in an 3% error ratio and they will credit you or provide you with new products that meet this ratio.