Manufacturing quality control

Quality control is used by manufacturing companies to make sure the products or services that are offered to customers live up to their expectations. When a company employs quality control, they will improve the safety, reliability, and maintainability of their products. Their sales will increase because the company is looking for ways to please the customer. They will overhaul their products to ensure that their customer's needs are met and that the design, development, and production of the product are successful.

With manufacturing quality control, companies will regulate their raw materials and assembly of these materials. They will take a look at all services that are related to the production of the product and they will also look at internal operations like management. There are three main aspects of manufacturing quality control:

• Quality Management
• Quality Assurance
• Quality Improvement

Quality control will help a company improve the actual product. They will also overhaul their existing processes to help them achieve consistent quality. There is an additional process known as failure testing that can help companies determine what outside factors may be hurting the product quality. There are often weaknesses within the manufacturing process like software failures, engineering problems, or design problems.

Quality Management
One of the largest factors of quality control is quality management. Quality management is simply teaching others how to create a product successfully. It can be looked at like a master artist that is teaching his students how to perfect his work of art. When the students achieve his level of quality, the teacher has used quality management. There are 4 steps to proper quality management:

• Breaking down barriers that exist between departments.


• Properly assigning leadership to managers and other people within the company.


• Constantly working toward improvement of products or services.


• Training and other educational courses that help the staff members develop their skills to improve the company.

Quality Assurance
Another important aspect of quality control is quality assurance. This is used to test the products to make sure they are going to meet the expectations and needs of the customer. When a product is looked at during this phase, the mistakes will be identified and eliminated at the beginning. The raw materials will be tested and the assembly and other levels of production will be tested to see if they are meeting the needs of the customer.
During the quality assurance phase, the actual quality of the product is determined by the customer. The company only manufacturers the product to be free of defects and problems, then it is up to the customers to determine if the product meets their expectations. This means, if a product is cheap, it may still be considered a quality product because the customer knew what they were paying for. If they were surprised at the quality of the cheap product, then quality assurance has worked.

Quality Improvement
The final aspect of quality control is quality improvement. This is the phase where most companies will use the Six Sigma methodology or the Kaizen method to make improvements within their organization. Companies will look at their employees and the workplace culture to determine if there are things that need improvement. This phase normally takes a long time to implement because the managers will need to re-structure how things are run within the company.

Employees are often resistant to change, making quality improvement one of the hardest parts of quality control. It may be easier to make small improvements over time than to introduce an entire new process to your employees. The Kaizen method is one of the best methods to use if you are working on the quality improvement within your company.