7 Major Quality Control Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
An organization invests months of research, planning, and development to manufacture a product for its customers. In most cases, the product requires the involvement of hundreds of people throughout its journey. However, if it fails to meet the desired quality standards when it reaches the end user, all the efforts and hard work become futile. While quality control measures can help a business ensure the final product meets user expectations, a few common issues can jeopardize the quality control process.
1. Absence of Training Procedures
Implementing quality control management software can help streamline your business’s quality-related operations. However, not providing adequate training or education on protocols and standards can cause inconsistencies and oversights in the work. Whether you are planning to use a quality management system (QMS) or not, it is important that you develop a proper training program to educate your employees about quality standards, regulations, and protocols.
2. Lack of Defined Quality Metrics
It can be difficult for your business to maintain quality standards if you are not tracking anything. Without clear and quantifiable metrics, you cannot assess product quality objectively. As the product standards become subjective in the absence of concrete parameters, your business may encounter discrepancies in evaluation. So, before you start working on quality control, it is important that you establish quality metrics to set benchmarks and then measure against these metrics regularly.
3. Overlooking Clear Documentation Practices
Not maintaining precise and up-to-date documentation is considered malpractice in today’s highly regulated industries. If your business has unclear or incomplete records, it will be difficult to track the product journey. As a result, you won’t be able to identify flaws or rectify errors effectively. While implementing proper documentation practices can help ensure smooth quality control, investing in a QMS tool can also help simplify these processes.
4. No Risk Assessment
There are businesses that either fail to conduct a comprehensive risk assessment or perform the assessment and ignore the results. This practice can lead to unforeseen quality issues. Your business must conduct a proper risk assessment to identify potential risks associated with the production process and supply chain. This helps you proactively eliminate potential problems before anything can affect your product quality.
5. Ignoring Regular Equipment Maintenance
Disregarding regular maintenance of tools and warehouse equipment is one of the common oversights that lead to major quality issues. As you may realize, faulty or inadequately maintained equipment can cause errors in the production process. This affects the quality of the products you offer. To ensure you do not have to worry about quality issues due to poorly maintained equipment, you need to conduct routine checkups of all the tools and equipment your business uses. If you are unable to do it with in-house staff, you can consider hiring third-party service providers for regular maintenance.
6. Neglecting Customer Feedback
If there is a major quality issue with your products, your customers will let you know. However, if you deliberately ignore customer feedback, it can lead to a disconnection between perceived quality and customer expectations. Whether customers send you emails, message you on social media, or post a negative review online, you need to pay close attention to the customer feedback. This will help you identify unknown quality issues and make your customers feel more valued. Customer feedback can help you refine and enhance quality standards. These customer insights can lead to continuous improvement.
7. Lack of Communication Among Different Departments
Insufficient communication among different teams in your organization can lead to errors and misunderstandings. If your quality control team does not effectively communicate with the manufacturing unit, some quality issues may persist for months and can draw a lot of backlash. When there is more transparency and collaboration between departments, you can reduce error rates and improve the quality of your output.
Conclusion
You need an effective quality control system in place if you want to have a competitive edge over your peers. Unfortunately, the aforementioned mistakes can undermine that system and lead to some major quality control issues. As long as you can identify these issues, your business can adapt more efficient and effective procedures to eliminate them.
