What is Quality Control Skills?
Quality is a term which refers to the ability of a product or a service to meet or exceed the expectations of customers.
Therefore, in order to ensure continued customer patronage, it is important to have basic skills about how to ensure that the products produced or the services rendered are, at least, of consistently high quality.
What Quality Control job description?
Quality may mean different things, depending on the nature of the product or service involved. Thus, it could mean performance (the ability of the product to perform consistently), conformance
(how well the product or service corresponds to customers’ expectations), safety (the extent to which the customers are free from injury or harm occasioned by the use of the product or service),aesthetics (dimensions of the product or service such as taste, smell, appearance, feel, colour, etc.), reliability (the consistency of the performance of the product), durability (the length of the useful life of the product or service), perceived quality (indirect evaluations of the product or service such as its reputation), and after-sales-service (the handling of complaints or checking on customer satisfaction after the sale of the product).
Poor quality products or services have definite consequences for a business organization which include the possibility of losing customer patronage, product liability claims (occasioned by litigation as a result of injury or harm caused by the use of the product or service), reduced productivity levels, and different types of costs.
The variety of costs associated with quality include:
Internal failure costs
These are costs that arise as a result of the product of service being found to be defective but before the products are sent to the customers. Such costs include the costs of reworking the product, scrap, and machine and employee downtime.
- External failure costs
These are costs occasioned by the deliver of substandard products or services customers. They include costs of return goods, reworking costs, loss of customer goods will and continued patronage, warranty cost liability claims, etc.
- Prevention costs
These are costs related to reducing the potential for poor quality products and service and their associated problems. Such costs include the costs of training personnel in quality control techniques, costs of executing quality control programmes, product design costs, etc.
- Appraisal costs
These are the costs involved in the evaluation, auditing and measuring materials, parts, and supplies, and the costs of assessing how products or services conform to quality standards.
The costs associated with quality could be very high and in order to minimize them, there is the need to ensure that good quality control procedures are put in place and operated very strictly.
Types of Quality Control
Different quality control techniques are available for ensuring that the products produced and the services rendered are of consistently high quality. Briefly, they include:
Inspection:
This involves examining the past output hich is to be used in a production process in order to ensure that the output conforms to the desired predetermined standards of quality.
Different inspection methods exist, and inspection can take place before, during, and after the goods have been produced.
Statistical Process Control:
This is the technique that involves the statistical evaluation of the output of a production process to determine whether the output is acceptable or not.
The procedure involves the establishment of the upper and the lower quality control limits of quality control charts first, and then taking periodic samples from the production process and then comparing them with a predetermined standard of quality.
If the quality of the samples falls below the predetermined standard, the production process is stopped to allow corrective actions to be taken.
But if the samples are found to conform to the predetermined standard, the production process is allowed to continue to run.
The quality control charts used are the means (or averages) chart (x-Chart)and the range chart (R-Chart), which are used to control quality variables such as weight, thickness, length, volume, height, etc., and the p-Chart and the c-Chart, used to control product attributes such as good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable, etc.
