Quality assurance and quality control

Your people did not yet understand what quality insurance is and what is the scope of their work and the reason of their presence. It is important for the company to try to get a specific training as well for them as for ALL other persons involved in production and managerial activities. Quality is not only the problem of the AQ DPT. but of the whole team from top to bottom.

There is a lot of misconceptions about how to maintain the quality of the product. To name a department quality control typical gives the impression that they control when normally all they do or should do is generate the specifications, put the testing stations in place and monitor the work done by the persons actually doing product quality control(the machine operators). The checks they make are normally after the product is made. By the time they do their checks you have already past the control aspects of production. What I like to see is for a name like Quality Assurance to be used and for the analyst to determine the product specifications desired and put in place the necessary tools and charts for the people making the product to use in monitoring their work. Say for instance every so many minutes the operators have to pull a sample and run through the gauging station then plotting their finds on the charts. The charts by having the upper and lower allowable limits in place allows the machine operators to track which way things are going in time to make adjustments before going out of spec. The majority of the responsibility for product quality needs to be on the machine operators. The quality analysts need to make scheduled checks at each machine and verify that the checks are being made and plotted. They need to make and record their own checks and see if they coincide with the operators. If there is any problems then the analysts needs to monitor things until everything is correct and stable before moving on. The analyst need to check all incoming materials and pull periodic samples from the shipping department as a final verification that things are correct. The Quality Assurance department is a necessary evil that generates no profits for a company but with out them the company may cease to make a profit. I know every company has different needs but maybe some of these methods could be put in place by your company. J.Conway

If the QA Dept is doing its job effectively, then it does turn a profit in unscrapped, unreturned product. Defective product costs the Company in time and material. Since profit margins are being competively narrowed all the time, no company can afford the extravagant levels of costs associated with defective / returned goods. Depending on the industry, a returned good that must be replaced eats the profit of 5 good ones at a minimum. How much of that can your Company afford?

Jerry,

They (QA) can prevent lose but they generate nothing profitable, the expense of their existence is quite high but they are a necessary evil in anything more than a one person operation. Think of it this way, you make a Widget, package it and send it out the door. As a one person operation everything rides on your desire to succeed so you are apt to spend more time on each step making sure it is as perfect as possible, its your Widget, your personal workmanship, your pride in doing things right. Its when you involve others whose interest is somewhat less than your own that it becomes necessary to oversee each ones performance because most don't take the same ownership as its creator. As the demand goes up and the pressure is on to up the numbers produced then each Widget gets less attention. Each Widget ends up having to meet or exceed a minimum level of perfection. Now because each person has different levels of what they think is acceptable you have to bring in another layer of protection for your Widget, you guessed it Quality Annalist. They normally have a certain number of your Widgets that through proving they are acceptable and worthy of shipping are destroyed so now you are paying people to destroy your perfect Widget. What does this do to your one in five estimate?

As I had stated before, QA is a Necessary Evil, they consume profits and resources and never produce one thing you can charge money for. Do we want to do without them, by all means, can we do without them? not quiet yet.

J. Conway

"How can i convince them to imlement Quality Assurance."

Become their boss.

Measure and structure reward systems based on prevention rather than detection.

Install mistakeproofing.

Determine statistical capability of processes. Improve capability.

But without authority, You can do none of these.

milo

Determine statistical capability of processes.

Please tell me some tool and techniques to determine stastical capability of process.

Thank you.

I used books to get my initial training, but Q1macros gives you the tools online to perform statistical process controls including capability studies.

http://www.qimacros.com/qiwizard/Cp-Cpk-template.html?gclid=CI3J39SBoZ0CFSBN5Qodn3lx1w

thomas pyzdek is an authority that I trust in this field:

http://www.qualityamerica.com/knowledgecente/articles/cqeIVH4_1.htm

http://www.qualityamerica.com/knowledgecente/articles/cqeIVH4_2.htm

http://www.qualityamerica.com/knowledgecente/articles/cqeivh4_3.htm

http://www.qualityamerica.com/qpproducts/cqm.htm

Now this will be considered heresy by most practitioners, but I have done quick studies with 30 consecutive readings, punched into a statistical calculator or excel to determine average and std. deviation then I create my avg plus and minus 3 std. deviations "capability band"

I then divide that by the tolerance and if that ratio is equal to 1, I know that I am going to have problems any time the process changes and so need to improve or over surveillance the process, If it s 1.33, I'm a little better off, and so will focus my improvement efforts on other processes; if its 1.66 or better I'm really OK with it.

There are a lot of text book reasons to say "Heresy" but for all PRACTICAL purposes, Why over complicate things?

If capability is less than 1, you are consistently making out of spec parts.

x bar and r charts are used for documenting your process monitoring and inprocess inspection for variables data (stuff that can be measured.)

Just google control charts, and statistical process control.

Help with interpreting or doing initial studies, just email me privately.

send data.

milo

Dear Milo,

Thanks for your co-operation. Please tell me your mail ID. I will send you my machine performance data. Then you tell me how I can make that data presentable and show capability of machine.

Thank you.

I did even more heretical: I used the Student approach and stopped when the values stabilized even if the number was under 30. As long as an official procedure has not to be documented the results are consistent enough to monitor the corrections.

For some processes the samplig size leads to stable values after les 15 measurements!

Quality assurance means quality insurance. Main objective of the quality assurance department is to assure the product of the organization is fit for use and the end user gets the value of the product. The concept of quality assurance has much in common with that of financial assurance. QA system is based on the fact that quality is the responsibility of all functions of a system. Quality is not the responsible of any one person; it is every one's job. Though this concept is used in many industries in India still long way to go. Whenever you get opportunity contribute your innovative ideas to the policy makers of your organization about the methodologies to assure quality and in long term it will yield good results. We can achieve quality collectively only and not individually.

Quality Assurance : Set the parameter before staring the process and based on the set parameter you can assure that that the product quality is good. Mistake proofing, fool proofing, POKA YOKE, SPC, techniques are generally used for it.

Quality control: it's a post-mortem activity. After production you check the material. Based on the checked sample you can imagine and tell that product quality is good.

Mistake proofing, fool proofing, POKA YOKE, SPC, techniques are generally used for it.

Do you have study material of this techniques.

Please send me. Thank you.

All comments are very interesting. I thing that this "new" way is a wrong way but........ Every one in the company is QC? yes, yes sure.

Looks like the only remaining activity for QC is NDT and in some cases DT.

If QC = Quality Concerned, then the answer is definitely "YES".

Quality assurance is not a result check but a PREVENTION of non-quality since prevention is A LOT more economical than CORRECTION.

The reason why management MUST be involved is the need for investment in test and instrumentation and this cannot be done without comprehension of those who approve the money for it.

Sandeep lokhande: Summary: Q.A. and Q.C. are two diferent visión and shull be in de same dpt., depending of the side de cia, no problem whit diferent boss. The rol is diferent one have zoom in the sistem the visión is integrate all de dpts in mantein the concepts in gral focused in certificatión ISO, QS, TS...etc. Respect to the tools shoul be used for working group o team bulding for solve quality problems, products and processes ingenieria in order to ensure the final product functionality. There are many tools within the Kaizen concept or TQA, Toyota production sistem,...etc..etc..etc.- It´s important to understand from top to bottom, defining policies, concepts, objectives, actions and monitoring of compliance to the methodology becomes a philosophy and work habits and conduct...... Theare a lot for any more ccvallino@hotmail.com . Best regardless

You have to set up Standard Operating Procedures for each one of your processes in all departments.

These procedures HAVE to be written and implemented by upper management to get commitment to the program. Otherwise, what ever program is implemented will go away like any Fad.

Then those procedures are handed down to the various departments and all the employees within each of those departments are empowered with being part of the decision making process to make changes to the Standard Operating Procedures when ever there is something that comes up that is an improvement. You can start with a suggestion box and implement the suggestions that by vote of all the members of that team see as an improvement before implementing such changes.

Quality Control is not about inspecting parts and correcting the error, it's about finding where that error occurred and fixing it at the source so it doesn't happen again.

Quality Control is not just the Quality Control or Quality Assurance's responsibility, like safety, it's everybody's responsibility.

Get the literature about Quality Control on line, there are a lot of sites that explain it. Print it up and study it and have training with your employees so they will understand what you want.

Another responsibility of Quality Control is to cut waste. I work in manufacturing machinery. Often times we make changes to machines but still use many of the same parts but some of the holes made in those parts aren't used anymore. Our engineers will send out the same drawing and our fabrication shop will make them. It's up to Quality Control to recognized that those holes are no longer necessary and need to be eliminated because they are costing the company manhours putting them in for nothing.

There's not much difference between Quality Assurance and Quality Control.

Hi Jannissaries.

I agree with you regarding SOP's.

I believe that the original poster may have an issue implementing "written" SOP's depending on the staus of their workforce.

We count on a literate workforce and a single language. That is not necessarily universal, and especially among all here on this global forum. I have shops here in North America with Documentation in english, spanish, polish, and vietnamese.

SOP's - Si!; Written SOP's- I 'm not sure thats within everyone's grasp.

milo

Whether his employees that are literate or not, they still need to be trained to understand them.

There are only three things that can be wrong with a company:

The System is faulty - That's Management

The Process is Faulty - Standard Operating Procedures

The employee needs more training - But...The employee is never wrong. You have to adopt the attitude that employees want to do a good job and please management.

The attitude of blaming others for mistakes has to come to an end.

You should have your managers look into ISO9001 certification if they are serious about producing a quality product consistently. If you can control your processes, you can cut down drastically the number of rejects and rework, and consequently increasing their profit.

you ask your quality control department to prepare quality assurence plan for your production process . this QAP will gauide you where quality inspectors check stages and their accetance tolerences standards. what type testings they will conduct on product on which stage . what are the process parameters to be followed for special process .

you have to conduct some testing on your product based on that product requirement . if that product passes all the testing as per stnadard specification , then customer will have more confident on your product quality.

if you tel me your product and production proces flow i will some more information.

regards,

kgk chowdary.

Dear Chawdary,

Our product is spices and we are packing it in pouches and cartons.

Thanking you.

The problems that you are having which is "let it fail" thinking is typical of management thinking. It costs money to "prevent problems". One method of preventing problems calibration of all equipment another inspections another following procedures to prevent damage to your product like static electricity using wrist straps. Then to convince management you need to document in a notebook problems that occur and how to prevent/fix the problem. Put this in writing give a seminar with powerpoint and you now have management in a position to make a decision they can not ignore. Best to you!