Every business has a standard; standards that make them stand out in their respective industries. A quality control plan ensures that your products or services are up to a certain standard. It is a major component of a well-run business, and it also helps to ensure that your business delivers a consistent product, service and customer experience. The presence of a quality control process in a company allows your business to operate without you, making it easier to be able to delegate duties and expand into new locations.
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If your products or services are of poor quality, you will end up spending a lot of time and money redoing them and eating into your profit margins. Also, if customers aren’t satisfied with the quality of your products and services, they will stop doing business with you, which doesn’t speak well of your company. Thereby, making it harder to attract and keep customers or employees.
It is the last step a product goes through before it is delivered to its customers. It is done to make sure that customers are satisfied with the final product. Quality control ensures that goods with defects do not go out to the public. Companies that have quality control methods in place often have employees who pay close attention to their work.
Below are 5 steps for inputting a quality control plan;
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Set your Quality Standards
Some quality standards are set by an outside body in some industries, such as a government regulatory agency, but if there are no official quality standards, it is totally okay for you to set your own. Each department of your business will have different quality control standards. However, they must all be objectively measurable. For example, quality control standards for your textile company may include the quality of cotton fibres sourced, wash fastness of the finished fabric, etc.
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Create an operational process to deliver quality
To be sure that your business manufactures and sells the best products possible, a lot of techniques are implemented to measure the product quality. These techniques may vary due to the type of business. Experiments are also carried out with quality control tests. The process is also revised if necessary, and if a product requires to be tested more than once, or to be tested in different areas, this test is added to the quality control plan. Training personnel, creating benchmarks for product quality and testing products to check for variations that are statistically significant, are also ways in which this is done.
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Review your standards
Financial, accounting or consultation businesses with software allow you to customize the information you collect, and use dashboards to view it easily at a glance, review your data regularly to see how well your company is meeting up with its quality standards. From this review, you can note where and how your company isn’t meeting up to standard and how you can correct it.
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Have a feedback mechanism
Every business should have a feedback system that helps them review better and make improvements. Customer surveys could be a type of measurable feedback system from external sources, to get a bigger picture of product and service quality. Also, getting regular feedback from your employees is a good system, as it helps you know how well the operational processes are working to deliver quality, and how best they can be improved upon.
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Don’t stop getting better
Finally, even when you seem to be meeting your quality control standards, don’t stop there. No matter how well your processes are running, quality control has shown that there is always room for improvement, and making changes no matter how small can pay off in really big ways. Quality control generally requires the company to create an environment in which both management and employees strive for perfection.
When you have quality control in place within a business, it can only help ensure product quality and the overall success of a business. The environment of quality control also influences employees’ attitudes about the workplace, and creates a sense of ownership towards the products and company as a whole.
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