Companies are constantly trying to reduce costs and eliminate waste in their quality control plan. The cost of doing business is constantly rising. This means that assuring business quality has become increasingly important. In this post, we’ll cover key points to make sure your quality control plan is airtight.
What is a Quality Control Plan
A Quality Control Plan is normally used to monitor processes, assuring that improvements and standards are solid and clear over a company’s lifecycle. It must detect non-conformances and launch corrective actions or process improvements to resolve unwanted outcomes.
The quality plan is built to describe the practices, resources or parameters required to assure the system’s quality. In other words, the quality control plan makes sure that employees have accurate information to execute processes according to quality standards. It must also include procedures to follow when non-conformances are detected. Here are some of the topics the quality control plan must address:
Quality Assurance: Process or procedure that provides evidence of the quality of the products or services being executed.
Quality Control: Techniques and operational activities performed by experienced employees to meet quality requirements.
Quality Management System: A set of processes, procedures and rules for a business or project area to meet customer expectations and regulatory requirements.
How to build a Quality Control Plan?
Quality control plans are meant to encompass instructions and methods to accomplish acceptable outcomes. Below we list the mains ideas that you might consider putting into your plan:
- Overview or introduction (with a plan background or scope)
- Organizational structure (team, departments and areas)
- Survey and Feedback mechanisms (internal and external)
- Performance standards and documentation
- Definition of deliverables and outcomes
- Corrective and preventive actions
- Task and process responsibilities
- Required notifications and alerts
- List of resources and suppliers
- Quality control procedures
- Training and courses
- Testing parameters
- Acceptance criteria
- Audits
Monitoring and testing
A monitoring system allows you to test and assess issues or non-conformances before they impact execution of your processes. If your company provides support services, your tickets may include information about processes, procedures and resources, so that specialists can follow processes systematically and evaluate outcomes, providing ways to improve ticket management. Remember, always run recurring tests to detect product or service problems that may not be in your stakeholders’ interest or could be prejudicial to people, animals or the environment.
Prevention mindset
Basically, the quality plan is divided into two main concepts; conformance and non-conformance. Conformance is connected to preventive activities. These activities are related to training, materials and documentation processes. Non-conformances, on the other hand, are issues related to any failures that require reevaluation or restructuring of everything connected to processes. So build mechanisms that allow employees to participate in constructing preventive actions.
Continuous Improvement
Basically this is an ever-changing cycle of processes to improve deliverables and outcomes. Whether through incremental changes done in small doses or through a project to identify and address major change, by using both you can run, adjust and improve any component of your quality control plan:
- Objectives: Specifications, effectiveness, deadlines, costs, resources, utilization, and so on
- Process steps: Practice, procedures, responsibilities and authorities
- Documentation: Required standards and specific instructions
- Procedural testing: Inspection, assessment and evaluation
- Change tracking: Historical data and information about changes and modifications
Quality management system
Quality of conformance are essential for continuous improvement. Achieving management excellence requires a good software to operate with maximum efficiency. Choosing the right technology for your business is key to success.