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Quality Assurance in Manufacturing: What You Should Know

To grow and progress over time, a company must be able to ensure control and guarantee optimal quality. This means that the company’s products and services must be continuously improved to match what customers want and expect.

One way to do this is to implement a quality assurance process that brings together and organizes all aspects of the company’s operations.

In this article, we explain everything you should know about quality assurance in an industrial manufacturing business and the steps to implement it.

What is quality assurance?

Quality assurance is a way for companies to improve by thinking about what their customers want. It is a strategy to get new customers while keeping old ones. But unlike other marketing strategies, the quality approach focuses on the positive aspects of the product or service offered by the company.

When talking about quality in business, it is necessary to differentiate between internal and external quality:

  • Internal quality: this concerns the improvement and control of the company’s operations at all levels. The beneficiaries are the management, the staff of the company, the shareholders and the customers
  • External quality: this is when the service or product meets the needs and expectations of customers and clients

A company wishing to develop a quality assurance process must strive to do a better job and satisfy its customers. It takes into account both what happens outside (external quality) and inside (internal quality) its premises when making decisions.

What are the main characteristics of quality assurance?

Quality assurance uses a management system to help improve the quality of products or services within a company. This system includes a set of activities that focus on managing and improving the quality of what a company produces.

It is generally characterized by the following points:

  • Quality assurance is a long-term process and allows for continuous monitoring of the company’s choices, as well as the decisions made and their impact over the long term
  • Quality assurance is participative, it engages the managers and involves the staff
  • It is dynamic, it creates a state of mind that is collaborative and concerned with the improvement of practices

What are the benefits of quality assurance in manufacturing?

The quality approach presents non-negligible stakes for the companies implementing it.

  • Reduction of production costs
  • Improvement of industrial safety
  • Reinforcement of the customer relationship
  • Increase in productivity
  • Reinforcement of the company’s credibility

All these advantages make quality assurance a particularly profitable strategy for a manufacturing company. The key is obviously to apply the right methods so that they develop in the best possible way within each department of the company.

5 steps to implementing effective quality assurance

To achieve efficient results that last over time, it is necessary to carefully prepare the entire quality assurance plan for your company.

1. Make a quality diagnosis

To carry out quality assurance in a company, you need to precisely diagnose the current level of quality. For this, it is often necessary to hire an external service provider who will handle this diagnosis.

The expert in charge of this analysis will examine the functioning of your company, the way you control your activities, the efficiency of your processes and your weak and strong points.

2. Develop commitment within the company

To implement the recommendations uncovered by the diagnosis, it is imperative for project stakeholders to set an example for all employees. To do this, management can make a written statement on its commitment to quality assurance and include it in the company manual if it has one.

With this new quality assurance process, the management team creates a plan for the company. This includes setting quality goals and objectives that are aligned with the company’s overall strategy. This policy must be written and given to all employees.

3. Staff training and orientation

Every employee who works for the company must be trained, competent and aware of the importance of their job. An employee who understands how quality benefits the organization will begin to question their work practices and behaviors.

With this in mind, it is essential to train and support all employees with a human and personalized approach. To do this, you can improve the monitoring tools and train the managers so that they can effectively convey your message.

4. Define new action processes

Here are several actions to apply to implement quality assurance in an industrial business:

  • Define the processes: name, purpose, main actions, risks and opportunities
  • What are the members and supports of the process: employees (and their functions), methods used (documents and supports), action areas, material means (machines, software…)
  • Define the external service providers who will help you in the implementation of the quality approach: audit company, industrial warehouse cleaning company
  • Define the quality objectives and key performance indicators

5. Deployment and follow-up of actions

Once the quality assurance strategy has been defined, you will need to follow the steps and procedures put in place within the different departments of the company. Continuous monitoring is needed to check that everything is working properly and that the indicators you have show that the process is leading to improvements.

This monitoring allows you to take the first corrective actions and make the first improvements if necessary:

  • Process reviews 
  • Internal audits 
  • Measurement of indicators 
  • Non-compliance follow-up 

Implementing quality assurance best practices for industrial companies

Implementing quality assurance in manufacturing has many benefits to your company if all the processes are implemented correctly. To make this process effective and sustainable over time, you need the support of all members of the company.

Our industrial cleaning company in Montreal can help you develop this approach, including plant cleaning and the refurbishment of your plant’s equipment. A complete and regular cleaning is one way to ensure quality in your manufacturing company.

For more information on our services, contact us now. We will take pleasure in answering all your requests.