COURSE: DIPLOMA IN APPLIED SCIENCES

SUBJECT: INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATION AND MANAGEMENT

Topic: QUALITY

Subtopic: The Quality Control Life Cycle

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Key Terms
 PDCA: The cycle of Plan-Do-Check-Act, four-step problem
solving process typically used in quality control.
 Continuous improvement: An ongoing effort to make
products, services, or processes better.
 Quality control: An activity, such as inspection or
testing, introduced into an industrial or business
process to ensure sound processes and products.
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The Quality Control Life Cycle

The quality control life cycle is an ongoing cycle of

planning, monitoring, assessing, comparing, correcting, and
improving products or processes. It is designed to improve the
quality of a product or process through continuous
reinvention. Quality control is used to develop systems that
ensure that the goods and services customers receive meet or
exceed their expectations.

Quality control both verifies the delivery of good quality and

identifies gaps and failures that need to be addressed within
the process. Ultimately, it is a process that continuously
evolves within the production process.

PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act)

PDCA (plan–do–check–act or plan–do–check–adjust) is a four-

step management method used in business to control and
continuously improve processes and products. It is also known
as the Deming circle/cycle/wheel, Shewhart cycle, control
circle/cycle, or plan–do–study–act (PDSA). Another version of
this PDCA cycle is OPDCA. The added “O” stands for observation
or, as some versions say, “Grasp the current condition.”
PDCA cycle: Plan, Do, Check, Act

The Four Steps

1. Plan: In this step of the quality control cycle, a

business establishes the objectives and processes
necessary to deliver results in accordance with the
expected output (the target or goals).
2. Do: In this step, a business implements the plan, executes
the process, and makes the product. It also collects data
for charting and analysis to be used in the following
“check” and “act” steps.
3. Check: A business then compares the actual result against
the expected result to find any differences.
4. Act/Adjust: After comparing results, a business takes
corrective actions on any significant differences between
actual and expected results. In this step, the business
analyzes the differences to determine their root causes,
then determines where to apply changes that will improve
the process or product.

It is important to keep in mind that this quality control

process is continuous and specifically designed to improve the
quality of business processes on an ongoing basis. The theory
underlying this is the scientific method, where observations
are made and hypotheses generated, which are then tested in
the next cycle.

The Quality Control Cycle

Quality control is used to evaluate and address the quality of

the goods a business provides.

Quality control is a business procedure used to assess the

quality of a company’s products or services against benchmarks
determined by the company, industry standards, or
clients/customers. Quality control includes inspecting a
product before it enters the marketplace to make sure it is
defect-free.

Quality Control (QC) and Quality Assurance (QA)

Quality control and quality assurance have different purposes.
Quality control emphasizes product testing to discover defects
and report them to management, which decides how to respond
(by delaying the product release date, for example). Quality
assurance attempts to improve and stabilize production
to prevent defects. In this way, QA is preventive and process-
oriented while QC is reactive and product-oriented.

Guidelines for Quality Control

To maintain an effective quality control program, a business

must follow these important guidelines:

 Decide on a specific standard for the product or service.

 Determine the extent of quality service actions.
 Collect real-world data to improve product quality and
adjust the QC process.
 Submit the result to management. If the percentage of
defective products is too high, management should take
corrective action to improve quality.
 Most importantly, a quality control process should be an
ongoing process.

Three Major Aspects of Quality Control

1. Elements, like controls, job management, defined and well-

managed processes, performance and integrity criteria, and
identification of records.
2. Competence, such as knowledge, skills, experience, and
qualifications.
3. Soft elements, such as personnel integrity, confidence,
organizational culture, motivation, team spirit, and
quality relationships. Deficiency in any of these three
aspects increases the risk of inferior products or
services getting to market. Quality control is one of the
most important procedures for any business because it
lowers that risk of customer or client dissatisfaction and
prevents losses for the business.

Total Quality Management (TQM)

Total quality management (TQM) is the continuous management of

quality in all aspects of an organization.

Quality management is the study of improving the quality of a

company’s products and services. Total quality management
(TQM) promotes the importance of improving quality on a
continuous basis. TQM asserts that quality improvement is a
consistent source of strategic advantage because it eliminates
waste and creates higher consistency. TQM involves all levels
of staff and management as well as facilities, equipment,
labor, supplies, customers, policies, and procedures.

Cost-Benefit Analysis

An important basis for justifying TQM is its impact on total

quality costs. TQM is rooted in the belief that preventing
defects is cheaper than fixing them. In other words, total
quality costs are minimized when managers strive to reach zero
defects in the organization.

The four major types of quality costs include:

 Prevention costs are costs created from the effort to

reduce poor quality. For instance, a company may train its
employees to do an effective job the first time or conduct
preventive maintenance on its equipment.
 Appraisal costs include costs associated with conducting
quality audits and the inspection and testing of raw
materials, work-in-process, and finished goods.
 Internal failure costs include the lost productivity and
waste associated with having to scrap or rework a product.
 Finally, external failure costs occur when the defect
occurs after the product has reached the customer. This is
the most expensive category of quality cost as it results
in returns, repairs, warranty claims, and potentially lost
business.

The Seven Basic Elements of TQM

These seven elements of TQM are:

1. Customer focus: Identifying customer needs and measuring

customer satisfaction are key first steps for any
business. Managing quality begins with delivering
precisely what the customer wants.
2. Continuous improvement: There is no perfect system.
Process improvements must be continuous. Constantly
identifying and improving on processes to increase quality
and/or lower costs is a primary responsibility of
operations teams.
3. Employee empowerment: Employees are observers: ensuring
familiarity with the individual components and the broader
process as a whole is integral in empowering effective
operations professionals.
 4. Quality tools: Quality tools are mostly model-based (i.e.,
flowcharts, cause and effect diagrams, scatter plots,
etc.) and involve manipulating output data to identify
weaknesses and/or areas for improvement.
5. Product design: Design and delivery of a product is also
an evolving process where product design can substantially
impact costs and customer satisfaction. Operations
professionals are in an ideal position to suggest design
changes that will improve quality.
6. Process management: This is often seen as a the heart of
TQM because improving the process itself is a goal
everyone in operations should be working towards all the
time. Simple process improvements like enhancing the
organization of inputs or the design of the plant can have
enormous cost implications.
7. Supplier quality: Finally, most companies are also
customers. This means that many of the inputs for a given
good will be coming in as goods themselves. Who
organizations buy from significantly impacts costs and
quality. This makes supplier management is a complex and
highly relevant component of TQM.

All of these elements emphasize the importance of improving

quality by empowering employees, providing adequate training,
and building a continuous organizational culture of
improvement. The idea here is to improve while continuing to
fulfill customer needs through effective use of internal
resources and process management.

Quality Awards Associated with TQM

There are several quality awards and standards for

organizations to strive towards. EG ISO 2001:2015

The RATER Model

RATER is a service quality framework that highlights five

important business areas customers use to analyze strength or
weaknesses.

Five Areas of RATER

 Reliability: did the company provide the promised service

consistently, accurately, and on a timely basis?
 Assurance: do the knowledge, skills, and credibility of
the employees inspire trust and confidence?
 Tangibles: are the physical aspects of the service
(offices, equipment, or employees) appealing?
  Empathy: is there a good relationship between employees
and customers?
 Responsiveness: does the company provide fast, high-
quality service to customers?

By measuring the quality ratings for these five areas, a

business can improve areas that are lagging. RATER uses a
multidimensional approach to pinpoint service shortcomings,
which helps a business understand why they are happening and
how to correct them.

Gap Analysis

Gap Analysis can be applied to each of the five RATER areas.

Gap Analysis is a tool that helps companies compare actual
performance with potential performance. The five gaps that
organizations should measure, manage, and minimize are:

 Gap 1: The management perception gap, or the difference

between the service customers expect and management’s
perception of customer expectations. If management thinks
customers expect one level of service when they really
expect another, this indicates that management does not
fully understand the market.
 Gap 2: The quality specification gap. This is the
difference between management perception and the company’s
actual specification of customer experience.
 Gap 3: The service delivery gap. This is the difference
between customer-driven service design and standards and
service delivery.
 Gap 4: The market communication gap. This is the gap
between the experience that customers are promised and the
experience they actually have.
 Gap 5: The perceived service quality gap. This is the gap
between a customer’s expectation of a service and their
perception of the service they received.

Addressing gaps is the ultimate goal of this process because

the deviation between customer expectations and actual quality
is where quality control and process improvements take place.

Total Quality Management Techniques

Six sigma, JIT, Pareto analysis, and the Five Whys technique
are all approaches that can be used to improve overall
quality.
Total Quality Management (TQM) is an integrative management
philosophy for continuous improvement of the quality of an
organization’s products and processes in order to meet or
exceed customer expectations. There are several TMQ strategies
used to improve business management systems. Considering the
practices of TQM as discussed in six empirical studies, Cua,
McKone, and Schroeder (2001) identified the nine most common
TQM practices as:

1. Cross-functional product design

2. Process management
3. Supplier quality management
4. Customer involvement
5. Information and feedback
6. Committed leadership
7. Strategic planning
8. Cross-functional training
9. Employee involvement

The following sections describe some other important and

widely used techniques that drew inspiration from TQM in their
focus on quality and control.

Six Sigma

 It focuses on improving the quality of process outputs by

identifying and removing the causes of defects while
minimizing the variability in manufacturing and business
processes Like TQM,
 the Six Sigma philosophy asserts that achieving sustained
quality improvement requires commitment from the entire
organization, particularly top-level management.

Just-in-Time ( JIT )

 is a production strategy for improving business return on

investment by reducing in-process inventory and
associated carrying costs.
 JIT focuses on continuous improvement to maximize an
organization’s return on investment, quality, and
efficiency.

Pareto Analysis
  Pareto analysis is a statistical technique used to select
a limited number of tasks that produce significant
overall effect.
 It uses the Pareto principle: most problems have a few
key causes. Pareto analysis also concludes that 80% of
the result can be generated by focusing on 20% of the key
work.

Five Whys

 The Five Whys is a question-asking technique used to

explore the cause-and-effect relationships underlying a
particular problem.
 The primary goal of the technique is to determine the
root cause of a defect or problem which points toward a
process that is not working well or does not exist.