How Quality Assurance Works: Dos and Don’ts to Consider
With competition getting fierce in almost every industry, it is must for you to keep ‘quality’ on the top of the priority list of your business.
Quality assurance is not just about delivering quality products or services that meet the expectations of your customers but is also about maintaining consistency in the quality. Measures for quality assurance offer rewarding benefits to the business apart from keeping their customers happy. Quality assurance works to:
• Help businesses grow their reputation with unbeatable quality products/services
• Build new connections or partnerships
• Save on costs for regulatory noncompliance
• Improve supplier relationships
• Explore opportunities in the international markets
While the answer to whether you need a quality assurance program in your company is a resounding ‘yes’, there is a certain approach to implement it. Here is a useful guide on how to make your program successful. We have listed the dos and don’ts to help make your approach effective and prevent any blunders.
Dos to Consider for Implementing a Quality Assurance Program
Focus on Leadership
A program for quality assurance must be initiated at the center of your business. This means there should be strong leadership governing the values of the program and taking it in the right direction. Leaders or managers of your business should first simplify the objectives regarding the quality of products or services. The objectives should be rational and focus on growing sales while improving the customer experience.
The quality management system (QMS) developed by your top management should be directed to achieve aligned and measurable goals. It is helpful to monitor and measure the performance of your quality assurance system.
Keep Customers at the Front
Rapidly evolving technologies and easy access to information and resources have lowered the barriers for startups to enter into a market. This caused hyper-competition in the markets, making it difficult for any business to acquire customers and also retain them. However, thankfully, retaining customers is a lot easier when you have a great hold over quality management and understand the needs of your customers.
With an effective quality management system (QMS) you can collect their valuable feedback, analyze their pattern of complaints, identify issues behind the recalls and survey the market to get an overall scenario of the customer preferences. All these will help a lot in improving your products or services and keep them aligned to your customers’ choices. When you better know what customers need, you can satisfy them more and make them your loyal long-term customers.
Need for a Composite Culture
Success of your quality management efforts are ensured when your organization’s management is proactive and makes everyone aware of their responsibility in meeting the quality expectations of customers. This means defining and establishing a primary quality culture across your organization where everyone is made a part of the QMS and allowed to use it to evaluate their respective processes. Establishing a quality culture also means defining a policy that constitutes the best practices, operational procedures, planning, goals, and decision-making regarding quality management.
Continual Improvement
This is one of the crucial considerations for formulating your quality management program. A comprehensive and practical QMS should be able to support continual improvement in your processes, suppliers’ items, quality control practices, and the final products or services. It encourages the employees to be attentive and discover opportunities for improvements. They should also be able to identify risks at their source or at the earliest and prevent them.
Continual improvement means as the preferences or tastes of customers change, new requirements emerge, technologies evolve, and new risks appear, your employees can be able to identify them and modify their processes to cope with them.
Achieve an International Regulatory Standard
ISO 9001 is the topmost recognized standard for quality management accepted all over the world. The standard specifies the necessary requirements and practices for quality management in business and so achieving it would help you benchmark your business’s approach to quality. As it demonstrates the adherence of your company to quality, it would open widespread opportunities for sales, contracts for partnership as well as international tenders for your business.
While these are the primary rules for making your approach to quality management effective, there are many things that you should definitely avoid.
Here are some of the mistakes you should avoid making to ensure your quality management system is successful.
Don’ts to Keep in Mind While Implementing a Quality Assurance Program
• Don’t focus on subjective reviews or opinions of your customers as they do not have any direct link with quality of your products or services
• Don’t lack cooperation and consistency in your organization’s management team who are responsible for effective implementation of the QMS
• Don’t jump to conclusions in case of any risks or customer problems before identifying their root causes
• Don’t skip innovation in your processes and need to update your products/services
• Don’t underestimate frequent and periodic audits of your QMS which help you to discover discrepancies or inefficiencies
• Don’t forget to work on improving your QMS following the findings of every audit
Bottom Line
Quality assurance works by promoting strong leadership, focusing on customers’ needs, building a cooperative quality culture, and driving improvement in the business continuously. If you are wise, you can further support your strong quality management approach with the international standard, ISO 9001. When you have successfully implemented good quality management practices, they also need to be benchmarked by a global standard.
Are you looking to establish a definite quality management approach in your organization? We, at Compliancehelp Consulting LLC, can assist you! We are a team of quality assurance experts with experience in the ISO 9001 certification and so can help you implement a suitable quality assurance program tailored to your business needs. Get in touch today!