How to maintain your reputation and customer loyalty with quality control
You can have warehouses full of components and materials, built-up delivery channels, links to all the correct business players, and an entire lineup of eager clients. However, all these become worthless without quality assurance.
Quality is crucial for maintaining a manufacturer’s reputation and customer loyalty. Poor quality can result in lost contracts, customers, and revenue streams. Successful manufacturers invest in a quality system to avoid these costs and ensure success.
Common challenges SMB process manufacturers face in maintaining quality control
LACK OF STANDARDIZED SOPS
Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are critical for achieving quality objectives and performance. SOPs must be standardized and established in all areas, including production, supply chain, equipment, training, and raw material consumption.
SILOED APPROACH TO QUALITY ASSURANCE
Legacy systems and siloed departments can create barriers and prevent businesses from consolidating quality control data. This lack of integration results in conflicting quality metrics and processes, making synchronizing people, processes, and systems challenging.
INEFFICIENT SUPPLIER QUALITY MANAGEMENT
To ensure compliance and quality standards, manufacturers must pay close attention to supplier quality. Insufficient insight into supplier performance can lead to high non-compliance costs and poor product quality.
IMPROPER EQUIPMENT MANAGEMENT
Equipment-intensive industries need a high Return on Invested Capital (ROIC) to meet regulations, customer demands, and internal specifications. Poor equipment management, like maintenance and calibration, can be expensive, prolong time-to-market, and cause defects.
HIGH COST OF QUALITY (COQ)
The Cost of Quality (CoQ) measures the resources used by a company for prevention activities and maintaining product quality. A high Cost of Quality is often associated with poor quality, scrap costs, and customer complaints.
How to develop a robust quality assurance program
DEFINE YOUR QUALITY OBJECTIVES
Quality objectives are specific, measurable goals that your organization wants to achieve. These objectives should be based on your customers’ needs and business goals. For example, setting a goal to reduce customer complaints by 25% next year or aiming to improve customer satisfaction ratings.
IDENTIFY YOUR CRITICAL CONTROL POINTS (CCPS)
CCPs are points in the manufacturing process where product quality can be affected. They can be identified through hazard analysis and critical control points (HACCP), a systematic approach to identifying, evaluating, and controlling hazards.
DEVELOP STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURES (SOPS)
You should develop standard, concise, easy-to-follow operating procedures (SOPs) for each CCP. SOPs are detailed instructions on how to perform a specific task, and they ensure consistency in your business processes.
IMPLEMENT QUALITY ASSURANCE MEASURES
An effective quality control program means implementing quality assurance measures to meet your quality objectives. These measures can include regular testing of products, an inspection of raw materials, and regular audits of your manufacturing processes.
TRAIN YOUR EMPLOYEES
Your employees need proper training on the importance of quality control, performing tasks correctly, and identifying potential quality issues. Regular training sessions should be conducted to ensure all are up to date.
MONITOR YOUR PROGRAM
Monitoring involves regularly reviewing your quality objectives, CCPs, SOPs, quality assurance measures, and employee training. Monitoring ensures that your quality control program is effective and identifies improvement areas.
For more insights on how to face the most pressing challenges in process manufacturing , download our ebook.
