Choosing the best quality control methods

Quality control is generally used in engineering and manufacturing in developing systems to ensure products or services. They are designed to meet or exceed customer requirements and are often developed together with other business and engineering disciplines. Choosing the best quality control methods for your manufacturing business can sometimes be difficult. It is a vital part of any good manufacturing business and without a good quality control method in place a system has no chance of staying in control of the worth of their product in the eyes of the consumer.

Different quality control methods
There are several different quality control methods you can choose from:

1. Quality Assurance. Quality assurance covers all activities from design, development, production, installation, servicing, and documentation. It also includes the regulation of the quality of raw materials, assemblies, products and components; services related to production; and management production, and inspection processes.
2. Failure testing. This is a valuable process to perform on whole consumer products. Tests are run on the product until it fails; it is often placed under stresses such as vibration, temperature and humidity. This generally exposes unanticipated weaknesses in the product and the data is used to drive engineering and manufacturing process improvements.
3. Statistical control. Most manufacturing companies will use statistical control to bring the organization to Six Sigma levels of quality. Traditional statistical process controls in manufacturing operations usually proceed by randomly sampling and testing a fraction of the output.
4. Company quality. The idea behind this was that is all departments of the company approached quality with an open mind; success was possible if the management led the quality improvement process. Company wide quality approach places emphasis on three different aspects.
5. Total quality control. This is the most necessary inspection control of all in cases where sales decrease.

When it comes to choose a manufacturing quality control method you need to look at a system that can adequately test the product you are manufacturing. The needs of a manufacturing company that produces steel will be much different than a company that specializes in something smaller. So how do you choose the best quality control method for your manufacturing business?

Here are a couple of common questions you can ask yourself to minimize your choices:

1. Is there anything that is causing your product to fail prematurely? Does the life of your product fall short of the expectations? If it does then you might benefit from product testing which aims at uncovering any weaknesses in the product.


2. Are you using a method of measuring performance levels that does not accurately find the deviations in the quality of your product? If this is the problem then you might need to improve your methods of statistical control; a quality control system that helps create normal distribution when it comes to the quality of the product.

There is no rule that states that a company has to choose only one quality control method. Many companies have used several different methods of quality assurance. If you find one that works for your company then by all means use it. If not however, you may find that mixing one or two quality control methods will work best for you.

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