This article provides a review of three proven quality assurance tips that are applicable for software, manufacturing, and service organizations. They provide guidance to senior management, as well as engineers and technical staff, for selecting and implementing quality improvement projects.
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When implemented correctly, improved quality can provide a profit center for the company. As Ben Franklin said, “A penny saved is a penny earned.” As the output quality of an organization improves, the costs of quality decrease, thus improving profitability.
Improved quality levels result when we work smarter rather than harder. Implementing these tips can provide you and your organization with ongoing improvements in production, a much more efficient means to customer satisfaction, and improved reductions in cost and scheduled completion times.
Tip No. 1: Co-locate project teams in the same area
Project teams that are able to experience daily, face-to-face communication are better at collaboration than remote team members. Also co-location is cheaper, with quicker compliance to last-minute changes.
Many organizations intending to reduce manufacturing costs through outsourcing have discovered that they actually incurred higher overall costs than anticipated. This can happen when detailed and clear product requirements have not been provided to the outsourced factory. If you are having trouble making a product at home, you should not expect it to be any better when you ship it overseas with the same product requirements.
Another drawback to outsourcing is that some cultures discourage junior staff members from reporting bad news or defects to top management. All stakeholders must be aware of how culture influences communication and the work ethic. Not everyone does things the way we do in the United States. Cultural misunderstandings result in frustration, unsatisfactory manufacturing output, time delays, and, ultimately, customer dissatisfaction. Even separating product team members across a city or the country can have a negative effect on schedule, costs, and quality.
Tip No. 2: Appoint a corporate quality officer (CQO)
The CQO is the organization’s quality champion and leads the quality department. A CQO is responsible for implementing excellence across the enterprise, and ensures that quality is represented at the highest company levels.
Quality is about process improvement, quality engineering, audits, error proofing, and detecting and removing defects in all departments. The CQO ensures that a consistent vision of quality is implemented across the organization. Virtually all industry standards call for companies’ quality departments to be independent of other departments and report directly to the CEO. To that end, the CQO reports only to the CEO and is equal and independent of the other heads of production, operations, marketing, and accounting.
One of the major tasks of the CQO is to help the company understand that quality must be designed into a product, program, or service from the start. As many companies have yet to learn, quality cannot be tested into an output downstream. You also need some good old-fashioned common sense and detailed, documented processes and requirements. The CQO should sponsor all of these undertakings.
Tip No. 3: Understand entry and exit criteria
These criteria must be established, agreed upon, and documented for each phase of the manufacturing process—and for each associated team, too. They should be contained in all project documentation, including the quality assurance plan (QAP), test plan, and development plan.
Clearly defined entry and exit criteria provide for a clear transition between phases and departments. By having clear and concise instructions with expected results documented, the flow of the quality product or service is controlled. This saves downstream manufacturing or production teams from attempting to build onto a defective product, which in turn saves time and effort, and helps maintain high quality. All procedures and requirements must be written so correctly and completely that it is practically impossible to build a defective product.
Quality must be fully supported from the top echelons of the company, with top management ultimately being responsible for the quality output of the organization. They send signals throughout the factory every day via messages and decisions that affect funding and budgeting, schedule changes, staffing, attitudes, and ultimately, profitability.
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