Quality assurance refers to an organizational system designed to prevent mistakes in manufacturing a product or producing products with defects. The quality assurance process should produce products fit for their intended purpose and produced through a process that gets it right the first time, without mistakes.
The quality assurance process is an important part of any organization. Following protocols makes sure consumers not only get a product they want and that works properly, but that it is also safe for them to use. Here we will go through some important quality assurance terms with which businesses should be familiar.
Benchmarking
In highly competitive industries, companies generally set benchmarks based on what the leaders in an industry are doing and how they do it. This helps raise quality standards for all companies in the industry.
Data and analytics are used to determine the strengths and weaknesses of a company’s strategies and processes versus the best-in-class business they are using as a benchmark. Using these benchmarks combined with data-driven insights, benchmarking can lead to quick and continuous improvement for a company.
COPQ
The cost of poor quality (COPQ), sometimes referred to as the cost of quality (COQ) or prevention cost, is a process that puts a tangible dollar amount on the costs of producing poor quality products as well as the costs of the quality assurance measures put in place to help avoid that situation. COPQ gives businesses a holistic picture of the costs associated with quality assurance.
Four main metrics go into COPQ. Internal and external failure costs express the cost of dealing with a poor-quality product before it reaches a consumer or after it does. The appraisal cost reveals how much money it takes to determine if you are complying with quality assurance standards and prevention costs show the cost of the quality assurance measures themselves.
GxP
GxP stands for “good practices” and the x represents the area of your company to which the good practices apply. For example, you can have good manufacturing practices (GMP), good laboratory practices (GLP), or good distribution practices (GDP) within a company.
These good practices help ensure that the products companies produce are of high-quality and safe. In certain heavily regulated industries, these GxPs are mandated by a governing body to protect the consumer from products that may harm them if good practices are not adhered to.
IQ OQ PQ
These three acronyms stand for installation qualification (IQ), operational qualification (OQ), and performance qualification (PQ). This quality assurance framework ensures machinery and equipment are capable of producing consistent results and can be found most often in regulated industries where machines are inspected for compliance.
IQ is performed when a company first receives some machinery. Staff check that it is the right machine and that the machine is configured with the correct specifications. During OQ, the machine is run under simulated conditions to verify that it works correctly. Finally, PQ integrates the machine into the manufacturing process and runs it under extreme conditions to establish the boundaries of the machine’s capabilities. For more on IQ OQ PQ, consider consulting this guide from Dickson.
ISO
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is an independent international organization that sets voluntary trade standards in multiple segments and industries. The organization has over 150 member countries and 20,000 standards.
The ISO sets standards in all types of areas such as environmental standards, social responsibility standards, manufacturing and processing standards, food safety standards, and more. The ISO 9000 series of standards is the most relevant on this list as it deals with quality assurance and quality management standards.
PDCA
This acronym, which stands for plan-do-check-act, is a continuous process improvement framework that can help organizations improve quality in any aspect of the business. It is a 4-step process that helps ensure a quality improvement process works as intended and in the most efficient and effective way possible.
The four steps are just what you might expect: creating a plan that you think will improve quality and doing that plan. Once you have enacted the plan, you should check to see if the plan had the desired quality improvement effects and finally, take action to refine or improve the plan to deliver the best results possible.
Sampling
Sampling is a quality assurance process in which a certain number of units are inspected for overall quality to determine whether the entire batch should be accepted or rejected. There are multiple types of sampling and, depending on the individual quality requirements of an organization, different types will be useful to different businesses or even different products within the same business.
Sampling types include single sampling, where only one unit is inspected to multiple sampling or random sampling, where a set number of products is chosen to determine acceptance or rejection. There are also forms of sampling like double sampling or unit sampling where a sample will determine whether to accept or take another sample.
TQM
Total Quality Management (TQM) is a system of quality assurance that incorporates every level of the organization to produce good quality products. Many quality assurance systems focus on the people and processes involved in the manufacturing of a product. TQM is a more holistic approach where the end goal is customer satisfaction, not just a good quality product.
This quality assurance system involves business functions that are not involved in most quality assurance systems: sales and marketing, finance, and engineering and design departments, among others. This system recognizes that quality assurance is a function of the entire organization, not just the production department.
Conclusion
Quality assurance is a broad and wide-reaching field in which there is always much more to learn and new terminology to acquire. Here are just a few of the important terms you should know in relation to quality assurance. They are a good start in familiarizing yourself with the concepts around the process. With these terms as a foundation, you can continue to build your knowledge base on your way to becoming a quality assurance expert.
