Five quality assurance tips to remember

Entrepreneur magazine wants you to avoid a product recall, and they’re throwing out these four tips for effective quality control. Modern QC encompasses a huge field of post-manufacturing activities, and Entrepreneur understandably scratches the barest surface. In fact, Quality Assurance and Quality Control comprise a whole specialized engineering discipline that a web listicle can hardly be expected to encompass.

QC is the testing and inspection of the final product. At the end of the day (or at the end of the assembly line), it is the final phase of an overarching set of activities now known as Quality Assurance. Quality assurance (QA) is the set of activities and standards built into a system to ensure high quality before the QC “court of last resort” renders its judgments.

QC is the testing and inspection of the final product. At the end of the day (or at the end of the assembly line), it is the final phase of an overarching set of activities now known as Quality Assurance. Quality assurance (QA) is the set of activities and standards built into a system to ensure high quality before the QC “court of last resort” renders its judgments.

Before you even reach the point of unit testing, regression test suites, and product rejection, here are five general quality assurance tips to realign your production activities to ensure a quality system:

1. DOCUMENT YOUR POLICIES Document all your quality control policies and expectations at the outset, train employees, and share the policies widely and openly. Share your goals with employees and ensure that their goals are aligned with those of the broader operation. Determine measurable results and score employees against documented measurables on a regular basis.

2. BUILD YOUR INFRASTRUCTURE Your production infrastructure should be capable of implementing your documented policies. As you uncover weaknesses in your processes, change or upgrade your infrastructure. Align your physical infrastructure with the Socratic ideals of your written policies using QC signs and tags to make your production infrastructure readable and comprehensible to employees at every level of the process.

3. AUDIT THE QA PROCESS REGULARLY This is the inspection of the quality assurance policies themselves, to determine if they are actively and effectively implemented by employees, and whether or not existing processes are controlling the correct variables to ensure quality. Inspecting the inspection processes themselves isn’t the Inception-like puzzle that it sounds like, and it’s just as imperative as the quality control testing of the final product.

4.ACCEPT THE UNACCEPTABLE — THEN CHANGE IT Or, to put it another way, if the QA process uncovers unacceptable results, it’s actually working. You now know what needs to change.

5. FOLLOW THE BRICKLAYER’S PRINCIPLE In a large manufacturing environment, the sheer volume of inputs seems daunting. Keep the bricklayer’s principle in mind— build your wall one brick at a time. Control for the likeliest weaknesses first, and then correct processes for the next likeliest weaknesses. One of the most obvious QC problems Amazon.com experienced back in the 1990’s was warehouse pickers selecting the wrong product from a shelf of similar products, and shipping it to the customer. The QA solution to this unacceptable QC outcome was elegant— Amazon reorganized its warehouses, shelving dissimilar products together to avoid confusion: Crock Pots with RC helicopters, ball point pens, and hair gel. The incidence of incorrect order fulfillment plummeted, allowing the company to focus energy on other weaknesses.