How to Improve Quality Control Procedures
5 Simple Ways to Improve Your Company’s Quality Control
Why improve quality control procedures?
Quality control procedures ensure that manufactured products conform to predetermined quality criteria or meet customer requirements. Improving quality control is vital for the continued success of any business in manufacturing and production. Consistently delivering high-quality products through processes that are at par with industry standards and looking out for ways to further improve quality control can help your business stay on top.
1. Engage all staff
Involve all employees and gain their buy-in and commitment to adhere to the organization’s quality standards and processes. Conduct onboarding for new hires and refresher training for tenured employees to help them understand that maintaining the quality of products and services is everyone’s responsibility, not only of leadership or the quality management team.
2. Be proactive
Reinforce quality control procedures through regular quality checks and immediately address nonconformance discovered during internal audits. Discuss improvement opportunities during employee trainings. Keep employees up-to-date on new processes and encourage them to share best practices and provide suggestions on how to further improve quality.
3. Automate recordkeeping
Documentation of quality control monitoring is not only required in maintaining quality and safety standards but is also a resource for continuous quality improvement. Conventional paper-based recordkeeping methods can be cumbersome and time-consuming, preventing some auditors from regularly documenting internal checks. Utilize automated digital recordkeeping to save time and ensure that internal checks are consistently recorded.
4. Seek improvement opportunities
Conduct customer surveys, review incident reports, learn from past mistakes in your organization and others in the business, stay up-to-date with industry best practices, and be on the lookout for new technology that can help improve processes and implementation of quality standards in your organization.
5.Utilize technology
Save time and maximize resources for quality control by using new technology such as sensors that automate monitoring of quality parameters and mobile auditing tools to record and analyze information that paper audit forms cannot capture.
Ready-to-Use Quality Control Improvement Checklists
- GMP Compliance
Use this Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) Compliance Checklist to evaluate your company’s adherence to manufacturing protocols such as quality control procedures. Perform facility walkthroughs of all relevant systems. Learn More - ISO 9001 Gap Analysis
Conduct a gap analysis to determine up to what extent your company is already meeting ISO 9001 requirements and where the emphasis of your implementation efforts should be. Assess the context of your organization, quality control procedures, etc. Learn More - 5S Manufacturing
Identify the unnecessary items stored in the manufacturing site and ensure machines, equipment, and tools are kept clean and in working order. Improve business productivity through workplace cleanliness and efficiency using this 5S checklist. Learn More - Layered Process Audit
Site supervisors and operations managers perform scheduled LPAs on the production floor and assess the conformance of staff to quality control procedures. Determine conformance with a reference image of the ideal scenario for a specific question. Learn More - Incoming Inspection
Validate the quality of purchased raw materials based on set acceptance criteria. This incoming inspection checklist has been designed to make it easier for quality inspectors to specify required actions based on the identification tagging system. Learn more - Check Sheet
Classify product defects according to type, location, or cause and indicate how often they occur. Quality control inspectors can easily identify the product to be inspected, take/attach photos with annotations of defects, and sign off with a digital signature. Learn more
