QUALITY ASSURANCE: CHARACTERISTICS AND EXAMPLE - JOB - 2024

The quality assurance is any systematic process for determining whether a product or service complies with specified requirements. Its role is to implement and maintain the established requirements to develop or manufacture reliable products.

It is intended to increase customer trust and credibility of a company, while improving work processes and efficiency, allowing a company to better compete with others. It is a way to prevent errors and defects in manufactured products and to avoid problems when delivering services to customers.

Quality assurance is a systematic measurement, comparison with a standard, monitoring of processes and an associated feedback loop that leads to the prevention of errors.

It comprises the administrative and procedural activities implemented in a quality system, so that the requirements and goals for a product, service or activity are met.

characteristics

The quality assurance system focuses on products throughout the entire production chain, from the design process to when they are shipped to the customer.

It centralizes all efforts in defining the activities and processes that allow obtaining products that conform to certain specifications.

It is intended that all functional groups contribute to preventing the quality failures detected. For this, the objectives that must be met are:

- Products or services that are defective cannot reach the customer.

- Repetitive mistakes should be avoided.

Any existing problem must be solved. To do this, you have to face it proactively in order to solve it at the root, not only by reacting to failures.

Quality assurance professionals must continually take measurements, plan quality, and design quality programs. The responsibility for quality rests with all the departments involved; quality must be built, not just controlled.

Importance

Waste reduction

Quality assurance systems identify areas that generate waste, or products that do not meet company specifications. When the company reduces its number of defective products, it experiences a reduction in waste.

Reducing waste creates savings. By identifying defects early in the production process, the cost to the company is lowered as fewer materials and man-hours are used.

Time efficiency

A quality assurance team can reduce the number of inspections required in a manufacturing organization.

The quality assurance team is separate from the production group and can therefore be objective in identifying areas where time is wasted during production.

They also ensure that production workers do not use valuable production time to inspect or evaluate the production system.

Higher customer satisfaction

The quality assurance system improves the quality of products and services, which increases customer satisfaction. This customer satisfaction leads to repeat business, customer referrals, and increased sales and profits.

A quality assurance system eliminates defective products. It also continually assesses the process to improve products and services. Quality assurance can result in a consistently reliable product or service.

Increased reliability in the final product results in customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. Companies with reliable quality earn a favorable reputation in the industry.

Improve employee motivation

Employee motivation is higher in a company that uses a quality assurance system. The organization is much more likely to function well, actively seeking ways to improve.

For example, a quality assurance system like Total Quality Management involves employees in the quality improvement process.

Employees become stakeholders in the success of the organization. Improved employee motivation reduces absenteeism and employee turnover.

Example

Human error

A hidden flaw in a trading system allows traders to make the human error of trading quantity with price. This has resulted in some incidents, whereby multiple orders with incorrect prices were shipped to customers.

The quality assurance area reports incidents to the executive team and promotes a quick change request, to add validations in the user interface that prevent the problem from happening again.

Systems

An Internet banking website has a service availability of 97.7%, but some pages have an availability as low as 93.4%. The goal and the industry standard is to have an availability of 99.99%.

The marketing team complains that customers are being lost. The quality assurance team investigates the problem and identifies various flaws in the service management processes and systems. They promote a program to address the problem.

Manufacturing

Quality control samples from a headphone manufacturer indicate a decrease in sound quality from batches produced in the last 3 weeks.

The department in charge of quality assurance investigates and discovers that the supplier has changed the materials in a part of the headphones. They pressure the supplier very closely to fix the problem.

Processes

A government entity sends a notice to a bank about various errors in customer accounts. The quality assurance area investigates and discovers that an employee incorrectly resubmitted a settlement process that executed 12,213 transactions twice.

The quality assurance team works immediately to contact affected clients, settle their accounts, compensate clients, and report to the government body.

QA submits a change request so that new IT controls prevent the problem from recurring. They also investigate why account reconciliation processes did not capture this problem.

Design

The quality assurance department reviews customer reports that an automotive navigation product is so difficult to use that it has caused minor accidents.

They find that the touch areas are too small, a problem that causes significant distraction while driving. The software teams create a new version fixing the problem.

The quality assurance team issues a product notice asking customers to update their software with a free kit.

References

1. Margaret Rouse (2018). Quality assurance (QA). Search Software Quality. Taken from: searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com.
2. Luanne Kelchner (2018). The Importance of Quality Assurance. Bizfluent. bizfluent.com.
3. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (2018). Quality assurance. Taken from: en.wikipedia.org.
4. John Spacey (2017). 7 Examples of Quality Assurance. Simplicable. Taken from: simplicable.com.
5. GestioPolis.com expert. (2001). What are quality, quality assurance and quality control? Taken from: gestiopolis.com.